What the Tweet Is Going On?
August 24, 2021
1 min 50 sec read
A whole lot is going on with Twitter lately. So we're rounding up the stack with a quick rundown of "What's happening?" in the Twitterverse!
If you've logged on to your Twitter account lately, you've definitely noticed many of the UI changes they've done. But
Twitter's new interface has people feeling "big mad."
Earlier in August, many Tweeters woke up confused when they logged on to find a drop in followers. Twitter users had mistakenly pressed the wrong button only because Twitter had made an accessibility change on their "follow" buttons.
The long-short is that Twitter made the background color of the "following" button status the same as the app's background.
Essentially the white-on-white button caused a flurry of unfollows by mistake. It was a knee-jerk psychological reaction that caused the frustration, which had many people wondering "why!?"
Here's an example of the change, so you can see why everyone was so mad.
Another new thing Twitter announced was their own patented font family called "Chirp," back in January, and it went official on August 11th.
According to Twitter's blog post, "Chirp strikes the balance between messy and sharp to amplify the fun and irreverence of a Tweet, but can also carry the weight of seriousness when needed."
The font comes in regular, black, bold, and features an easter egg when you type: "[CHIRPBIRDICON]" to output the bird logo.
Twitter is going through something, obviously, but they're rebranding the entire app's look and feel. They've updated colors to have a higher contrast with less blue.
According to a
thread posted by Twitter's design account, photos and videos will have a change that draws more attention to them.
In other news, Twitter rolled out its "Spaces" feature in May, similar to Clubhouse, a social media app that focuses on live conversations, and Twitter has made some recent upgrades to their version of it.
They've updated their API,
making it easier for other apps to point to Spaces outside of the Twitter app.
Twitter has allowed the main host to add co-hosts who can act as moderators and manage rooms. A Twitter Space can have two co-hosts, and they can only invite speakers, remove guests, manage requests, pin Tweets, and other functions. As it stands right now, the main host can end the convo but co-hosts cannot.
Hopefully, these new features will make it easier to manage large rooms. Too bad Twitter can't manage how people feel about their UI changes.
