We haven’t heard much from Twitter recently. Facebook has been in the limelight for reasons both good and bad, and Google+ burst onto the scene to an overwhelmingly positive reception, but Twitter have been fairly quiet since announcing their photo-hosting service a few months ago.
Last week Twitter were back with a vengeance, though. Early in the week they announced their previouly spartan search page, search.twitter.com, was being moved to twitter.com/search and a slew of new features added. The first was trending pictures, which roughly equates to a selection of the most-viewed pictures on the topic you’ve searched for (for example a search for “Space Shuttle” may return the cellphone picture taken from a plane window that went viral earlier in the year).
Twitter has also added its own custom search operators, so as well as the standard selection you can also search for tweets by sentiment (for example, a marketing team could search for tweets about their company that are negative), time, location, source or content.
Twitter also made a new monetisation play this week with “Promoted Tweets”. Seemingly not as intrusive as their “Promoted Trends” product, promoted tweets will allow sponsored tweets from brands you follow to float to the top of your timeline, ensuring their visibility. With a recent study showing that a tweet’s lifetime may now be as little as fifteen minutes, visibility on Twitter may indeed be worth paying for. Twitter is trialling the new system with a number of large companies including Dell, Groupon and Red Bull, and will hope it proves a successful revenue stream. Twitter has historically struggled to monetise its service, and has thus far been primarily reliant on outside funding to stay afloat.
Lastly, Twitter is looking to protect our innocence by introducing a new “Possibly Sensitive” field for images and videos. Once a piece of content is flagged by either the original uploader or another user as “sensitive”, a clickthrough will be required in order to view it in Twitter’s media pane.
