Twitter Announces It’s Working on a Bookmarking Tool (Oct 10, 2017)

Several Twitter employees tweeted on Monday evening about a new feature the company is working on, which would allow users to bookmark tweets. This is a fix for the ambiguity of what started out as the “favorite” feature (denoted by a star) but morphed into a “like” feature symbolized by a heart – while some users have undoubtedly used it for bookmarking, it connotes approval of the tweet as well, which can send the wrong signals. Why Twitter feels the need to test this feature, which seems to work perfectly fine in the screenshots the employees shared, is beyond me – it feels like Twitter could have just pushed this feature out without testing it broadly, especially because it doesn’t break anything connected to the way Twitter works today and merely adds value. That’s indicative of the slow speed with which Twitter has fixed basic issues with the service over the last several years. More importantly, though, as with the recent change to the character limit (also still in testing), it still feels like Twitter is tinkering around the edges rather than fundamentally changing the experience in ways that would make it more accessible, especially to new or casual users.

Update: later in the day, Twitter also announced another feature, also covered by BuzzFeed here. This one feels much better aligned with what Twitter really needs to be working on in terms of making the site more usable for those who haven’t spent ages curating feeds, and it appears to be built on work the company previously did for its live video events. However, it’s still event-based and therefore somewhat limited – it doesn’t, for example, allow people to follow topics of ongoing interest.

via BuzzFeed


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