Twitter is engaged on a characteristic to divide lengthy textual content right into a thread robotically
Composing a thread on Twitter might be difficult as you might want to separate the entire textual content into 280-character chunks. Nonetheless, the corporate now appears to be engaged on an answer to show long-form textual content right into a thread robotically.
Based on a tweet posted by app researcher Jane Manchun Wong, twitter’s composer will robotically break the textual content right into a thread when it crosses the 280-character restrict.
As she defined in a reply to a consumer (aka me), Twitter desires to cut back the friction of making threads. Presently, customers have to hit the + button so as to add a tweet to a thread and publish the following set of 280 characters — which might be very annoying if you find yourself attempting out a thought or pasting data from one other doc.
In the previous couple of hours, a couple of of us identified difficulties in posting and studying threads which have quite a lot of tweets — the one in focus was an 82-tweet-long thread on the fallen cryptocurrency alternate FTX. Musk replied to those tweets saying that the staff is engaged on making thread writing simpler.
Whereas the ultimate particulars of the implementation usually are not obvious, as Financial Times product manager Matt Taylor identified, it is going to be good to have markers to point the beginning and finish of a tweet within the thread — that makes it simpler for customers to edit the textual content in a means that it doesn’t break the studying movement.
This isn’t the primary time Musk has addressed the difficulty of posting long-form tweets. Earlier this month, he mentioned the social community is working on the ability to attach long-form text to tweets. It’s not clear if that will likely be a separate characteristic from the brand new thread composer. Some customers presently depend on third-party options like Typefully, ThreadStart and Chirr App, which offer instruments to robotically cut up your publish into threads with out breaking sentence movement together with scheduling options.
The corporate presently affords Twitter Blue subscribers a simple approach to learn threads — powered by its acquisition of Threader final 12 months. However Musk hasn’t actually talked about if he’s making adjustments to the studying expertise for a mean consumer.
Twitter already has a program for long-form writing called Notes, however solely a choose set of writers have entry to that, and with Musk’s administration, there isn’t a readability about its future.
It’s not clear when the brand new composer characteristic for threads will roll out even when Twitter engineers are engaged on it at this second. After taking up the corporate, Musk has fired half the staff — and more. Loads of executives have resigned and the brand new boss even put an ultimatum yesterday that the remaining workers need to be “hardcore” or leave. On this surroundings, there isn’t a assure that merchandise will likely be shipped on time.
The corporate rushed the rollout of the new Twitter Blue plan with a verification mark, solely to discontinue this system days later. Earlier this week, Musk mentioned that it’s going to now roll out later this month.
Wong additionally not too long ago found code hinting that Twitter is engaged on making direct messages end-to-end encrypted.