Twitter is doing a lot of things in attempts to retain its existing users and attract new people.
And who can blame them?
In the past year, the microblogging platform has finally enabled DMs for non-followers, implemented a polling system, replaced “favourites” with heart-shaped “likes”, made a dedicated GIF button, and revealed that they were working on a 10,000-character limit. This is on top of the other fun things that they’ve thrown into the mix such as hashtag emojis.
Now, according to recode, Twitter is looking into a new social networking idea that’s similar to a feature already available on Facebook – stickers.
That’s right. Twitter might soon allow users to jazz up their pictures with colourful, customisable additions. One user, @XBLFoxes, shared a screenshot with the new sticker option in the right-hand corner of Twitter’s photo editor.
A spokesperson confirmed the news to VentureBeat saying, “We’re always researching potential new ways to make Twitter more expressive.” Twitter is not the first to roll out a stickers feature, of course. Other social media platforms that have been utilising stickers include Facebook, Snapchat, and Path.
However, unlike Facebook, Snapchat, and Path, on top of the planned feature hopefully and eventually encouraging more engagement i.e. people tweeting more photos, Twitter says that the stickers will also let you “see how other users from around the world have edited the same photo” and “suggest photos that you can edit and post to participate in trending conversations and breaking news.”
How will Twitter get the photos and how will it determine which ones to recommend to users? Nobody really knows – yet. But recode did suggest that Twitter could categorise photos based on which stickers they’e associated with. So let’s say a user shares a photo with a heart sticker, he/she may be shown other photos that include the same heart sticker.
The idea is still currently being put through some research/trial runs, so we don’t know if Twitter will ever roll out stickers and make it available to the rest of the world. But it would be cute addition to the platform, no? 🙂
Sources: recode, engadget, VentureBeat.
