Twitter's "Experiments" Comes To iOS Users

Twitter has decided to take Experiments, the beta testing program to iOS platform now. It is in the early stage at the moment.

Back in 2013, the social network giant, Twitter unveiled a testing program, beta version. That beta program was made available to the Android users which let them try the new builds for the platform and also be able to test the features that are in the experimental phase before they could be released publicly. That program has now been made available for the iOS users. The reports had been confirmed by the social network’s representatives stating that some of the users had been receiving the invitation via the message in their app.

This latest Twitter news was reported to us by couple of users who expressed that they had been notified with the pop-up on iPhone app for the social network. It asked the users to join the “Twitter for iOS Experiments Program.” This program has been unveiled and made available so the company can be helped by the end-users in order to test the new features and also the fixes. It is distributed by the company’s Crashlytics service.

Crashlytics is a service for crash reporting that was acquired by the social giant back in 2013. It is the part of broader platform named Fabric which is for mobile development. The same year after acquiring this service, the company introduced “Beta by Crashlytics” which provided the testing platform for app beta.

Twitter news reports that as per the public documentation which details the iOS experiments program. The testers that are volunteering in the program will be given the access to the testing/experimental versions of the application. It shall include those features that are supposed to be confidential and secretive by the testers. This points to the fact that if the user participates in the volunteer testing program and see an interesting feature in the beta build for the app then you are not supposed to tweet about it or share it with others for that matter.

There had been a lot of rumors regarding the program coming to iOS, for instance, one of the Reddit users spotted that there had been a support documentation regarding this in March 2015. Furthermore, in April, there had been users that tweeted regarding the invitation being received from the social network to join the program however when they clicked on the link they discovered that the link was broken.

There had been a handful of reports being received regarding iOS Experiments by Twitter which points out to the fact that it is only in the early stages at the moment. According to people closed to the context, it currently includes participants in several hundreds but the company plans on involving more.

Twitter Is Making Itself More User Friendly

Twitter unrolled a feature that will make it easier for users to track back their conversations

Twitter Inc. is a very huge company now. In 2015, despite of not posting good results, it is growing substantially. The company also noticed a slower growth in increase in users as well as its monthly active users has declined. All of this has concerned the investors of the company regarding whether they should trust the company in the future or not. The company is making various changes to its interface as well in an attempt to make it more attractive and user friendly for its new and existing users, according to latest Twitter updates.

Recently as reported according to Twitter news, the company is removing features and tabs along with adding many new features and tabs. Moreover, it also added a ‘While You Were Away…’ feature that was targeted to keep those users updated that are away for the time being from Twitter. Now according to the latest update, the social media network is all set to make things more easy for social media addicts. There is no doubt in the fact that gradually Twitter is becoming the most favored social media forum when compared to Facebook and other competitors. But Facebook still leads the market by miles in terms of users, monthly active users, and revenues.

The company has now revealed another appealing feature for the lovers of micro blogging platform that will make it easy for them to follow and track conversations under various tweets. The new feature of Twitter will be available to users who use the service on Web. Previously, the product manager at the company, Akarshan Kumar expressed his concerns regarding tweets and following conversation surrounding it by saying “Conversations surrounding a Tweet, particularly if they’ve sparked lots of replies and disparate conversations, can be hard to follow.”

This point made the company to work on it and make it easy for everyone to keep a track of their conversations under any tweet. Hence, the company is now grouping all conversations together as well as highlighting other interesting and related conversations around that tweet too.

According to The Next Web “Twitter will decide what tweets get highlighted by taking a number of factors into account, like whether the original poster has replied. Conversational tweets are connected by a line and there’s a button you can click to ‘View other replies’ as well.”

Twitter has confirmed that this feature will be available to all users starting today that will be using the social media network today on Web. However, the company plans to introduce this in mobile apps in the near future. 

Twitter Inc Move on Limiting Abuse and Abusers

Twitter has begun tweaking the privacy policies and the product it self as well.

Latest twitter news reports that the social network giant has announced changes in the product as well as the policy with the aim that it shall bring in more secure and tackling move against the abuses and violent threats on the social giant’s platform.

The main issue is the conventional ‘social networking’ being misunderstood and assumed as a medium where minority groups can have an extensive opportunity of spreading sentiments pertaining to terrorists and also harass women or abuse them for that matter. In recent times, such course of events has raised and is bound to be looked into as it affects the person’s life in a great way.

Despite the terrorism, GamerGate saga rebounded on the social network as it was discovered by the women associated with the game industry that the social network platform had been used for misogyny and harassment that also included rape threats, death threats, doxxing and graphic material.

 This is however not an exception. There have been many times where public figures and entertainment industries have been targeted and suffered from abuses. One example is Caroline Criado-Perez who is a feminist and British journalist. Another one is Robin Williams’s daughter who was abused following the death of her father.

Twitter news is regarding the strategy for the abusive trolling and dealing with it. Some of these factors are still in the process to be finished. The social network has definitely worked out some balance between being the platform of free speech and the platform that is dumb to be conduit of bullying people online. The tweaks series is one of the steps towards it.

The Product management Director for Twitter, Shreyas Doshi expresses, “As the ultimate goal is to ensure that Twitter is a safe place for the widest possible range of perspectives, we will continue to evaluate and update our approach in this critical arena.”

One significant change the social network has unveiled yesterday that is most likely to be a change in product itself instead of merely a policy. That includes a feature which shall help the social network to suspect the tweets that might sound abusive and limit them.

Further it was added by the director that the feature, currently in testing process, is going to examine the tweets and activities that might correlate with abuse. This will not affect the way we see the content but the fact that it will help the social platform to limit the harm or content that is potentially abusive.