Here’s rather interesting news, Twitter’s rolling out its updated visual customization and editing tools to more users. With all the focus it’s been giving to Tweet sharing and Spaces options lately, to hear that the Blue Bird platform is out to deliver ‘richer’ visual content is quite refreshing.
This notification, posted by @WFBrother, shows Twitter adding new visual enhancement tools which will enable users to add various elements such as “stickers, text, crops and more” to uploaded images. Said images can then be attached to Tweets, potentially giving them more presence and improving their creative flair.
Good Angles
Twitter has supposedly been experimenting with these for months, but initial reports did surface back in September. During that stage, it was primarily in a beta-phase and was not yet released to the public, but now, users are starting to see the new options appear within the app.
The update also adds a new UI for your Tweet visuals, reminiscent of the IG ‘Stickers’ frame, making it more streamlined and aligned with visual editing tools as found on other platforms. It also provides additional, new in-app options that give users more creative control with their attached Tweets.
@WFBrother also includes these screenshots of the current visual editor (left) and how it compares to the new format (right). Based on what we can see, the new format is more simplistic, giving users a sleeker and cleaner-looking visual editing environment, allowing them to better focus on image elements so as to arrive at overall higher-quality posts.
In terms of enhancements, Twitter is adopting the same visual elements of Fleets and adding them to this new interface, providing more ways to create full-screen displays within Tweeted images. Originally, Twitter was poised not to do it. In August, in line with announcing its intent to retire Fleets, Twitter noted that it would be taking what it learned from Fleets and applying them to its newer developments:
“Soon, we’ll test updates to the Tweet composer and camera to incorporate features from the Fleets composer – like the full-screen camera, text formatting options, and GIF stickers.”
This is what seems to be currently happening, especially given that Twitter also now has an updated visual display format which shows larger images within Tweet streams. In a way, it’s a disheartening downgrade of Fleets, even more so considering that Twitter acquired Chroma Stories last year. The visual editor was focused on a Stories format and stood to add a lot of interesting, creative visual additions to Fleets. Too bad lack of sufficient interest killed off Fleets before these ever arrived. However, with the new visual editing options, these elements can yet be put to good use.
The Wrap
Hopefully, with what they were able to pull from the failure of Fleets to catch on, these new and improved visual enhancements fair far better and manage to acquire the same kind of longevity and establishment as enjoyed by the likes of Instagram and Snapchat. While Twitter seems to have more in the works, for now, the new visual editor is definitely a breath of fresh air that can potentially, if only sporadically, increase Tweet engagement and Twitter’s overall appeal.
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