Just because you create a successful product doesn’t mean the work is over. With every innovation comes improvements, updates and upgrades. Twitter this week updated its mobile app for Android and iOS, as well as mobile.twitter.com, to emphasize on-the-go usage with a single stream of content.
Updates include a new display for the Connect tab, which now defaults with Interactions to show new followers, retweets, favorites and mentions. For those users who prefer to only see mentions, the display settings can be adjusted in the “Connect tab” options in settings. The speed of links is also improved: clicking on a URL in a tweet now takes you directly to the link instead of expanding and previewing it in another Twitter tab. Discover, which includes tweets, activity, trends and suggestions of accounts to follow, is now condensed into a single stream and features new previews for activity and trends.
Old vs. New: Twitter’s Discover tab.
It seems search is a hot topic in social media right now, with Facebook’s recent launch of Graph Search and now Twitter’s update to Search. With this week’s update, search results now include a mix of tweets, photos and accounts in one stream and a more prominent search button – which already was available in Android and iPad apps.
The display isn’t the only thing that changed about Search in Twitter. Users can now find older tweets using Search. Up until this week, Twitter search results displayed results that went back about a week.
“As we roll this out over the coming days, the Tweets that you’ll see in search results represent a fairly small percentage of total Tweets ever sent. We look at a variety of types of engagement, like favorites, retweets and clicks, to determine which Tweets to show. We’ll be steadily increasing this percentage over time, and ultimately, aim to surface the best content for your query. For now, enjoy your trip down memory lane!” Twitter said in a recent blog post.