More Twitter news, hooray- Ugh. Not to badger on Twitter or anything, it’s just that you can recently read up several news articles about the platform that keeps talking about the same thing. Anyway, Twitter’s new text formatting options come a step closer, with its updated native text display now moving to the pre-deployment stage.

Up-Format

This would not be a complete update if it didn’t involve at least one legend, with said legend being the magnificent Alessandro Paluzzi, who shared how the new format is set to look – Tweets will soon have bold, italic, and italic options within the Tweet composer window, providing a bit more variety to ‘sauce up’ your words.

Chief Twit Elon Musk flagged the coming update back in January when he also noted that adjusting a Tweet’s font size would also soon become another creative consideration. That doesn’t appear to be part of this initial launch, at least not at this stage. Twitter Designer Andrea Conway shared a preview of the impact the update could have on Tweet timelines.

It honestly doesn’t look all that great, but in all likelihood, most people won’t use these formatting options, so it probably won’t spark a huge shift in usage, which is good if all that’ll do is lead to a Tweet that’s a steaming mess. Probably. The update’s main goal is to share longer messages in the app, with Musk aiming to facilitate long-form content to get more creators posting more of their material via Tweet, as opposed to linking to third-party sites.

Twitter has already extended the maximum Tweet length for Twitter Blue subscribers to 4,000 characters, with recent reports further increasing that to 10,000. Meanwhile, Twitter’s also working on a new in-app keyboard display that would enable users to add line breaks into their longer Tweets to make them more readable in-stream. At least within this context, text formatting makes more sense – regardless, you can pretty much already use these types of formatting functions, since Twitter supports Unicode functionality.

The Wrap

It’s simply not native and intuitive. Making these functions more immediately available will definitely see more people using stuff like bold and italics, which could be a mistake – but maybe, in the context of more creative options, particularly for longer Tweets, it somewhat makes sense. Nonetheless, it seems that we’ll all find out soon, with Twitter moving to the next stage of experimentation with the option, which could see it soon shift to live production.

Sources

http://bit.ly/3n8qoMt