Greg Finn says, “The beauty of Twitter has been in the simplicity of the service. A user Tweets and that message appears in a follower’s feed, uninterrupted. This however may be changing. A new “While you were away…” feature has begun showing up for many users that is compiling top Tweets that have occurred since a user had last signed in. This would allow for Tweets to have a longer shelf life and have the ability to gain more traction. Currently Twitter has an alert system that will notify users of important Tweets, but this new system would be a set location where the best of... [...]

Lara O’reilly says, “APTwitter CEO Dick Costolo’s Twitter feed may be packed with autoplaying videos soon. Twitter is debating internally whether to launch a feature that would see videos begin to automatically as users scroll through their timelines,sources have told Adweek. One industry insider called the debate “a tug of war.” It’s a move that would no doubt please advertisers, as more people’s eyes would be attracted to their branded content and ads, but could send users running as videos begin to clutter up the feed. Twitter autoplay video would build... [...]

Martin Beck says, “Twitter today announced that it’s giving mobile app advertisers a way to fine tune their ad targeting, allowing the creation of audience segments based on app actions such as install, purchase or sign-up. The basic idea is to help advertisers focus on reaching people who are most likely to engage and enable the exclusion of people who already are interacting with a company’s app. Product manager Kelton Lynn explained in a blog post: Tailored audiences from mobile apps can help you drive the highest possible ROI in your app install and app engagement campaigns. You... [...]

Re/code team says, “In the spirit of Black Friday, I’m sending along my holiday wish list to Twitter. I’d like a better search feature, please. And the Direct Messages tool could use a facelift, too. But if there’s room for just one gift this year, I know what’s at the top of my list: Changing the 140-character limit. Since Twitter’s founding in 2006, all tweets have been constrained to 140 characters. It made sense in the early days. Users initially received tweets as an SMS (text message) which had a 160-character limit. No one wanted to receive three or four texts to read a tweet... [...]

Richard Procter says, “Consumers may trample over each other to get cheaper TVs and laptops this season, but Twitter’s advertising partners may have found the best Black Friday deal of all—the ability to tweet you promotions. Just in time for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the microblogging network announced “Twitter Offers” on Tuesday. The service lets retailers tweet deals directly to customers, and users can easily grab one of these promotions within the tweet itself”. Twitter Lets Retailers Tweet You Deals—Just In Time For Black Friday ReadWrite  [...]

Martin Beck says, “Twitter is adding another feature to its fledgling e-commerce stable, today introducing Twitter Offers, which will enable advertisers to offer digital coupons within tweets. Twitter users who see the tweets will be able to claim the offers by linking their credit or debit card accounts to Twitter. The discounts can be redeemed using the synced card, either online or in a retail store. This brings some obvious benefits for retailers, who have long struggled to link digital marketing with retail sales. As Twitter product manager Tarun Jain explained in a blog post: With... [...]

Lauren Orsini says, “Twitter announced Thursday that users can now share public tweets inside direct messages. If that announcement struck you as a headscratcher—couldn’t you do that before?—you’re not wrong. You’ve long been able to include links to a tweet’s detail page in a private message on Twitter. But especially on mobile devices, that’s been a cumbersome, multistep process. Twitter now makes it a feature that’s easily available by pressing down on a tweet for a longer period, which could encourage more people to have private conversations about... [...]

Rex Santus says, “Today in features you may not have known you wanted: Twitter is letting you directly share public tweets through its private direct messaging system. If you copy and paste a tweet’s URL into a direct message (DM), it will embed itself in the message for easier viewing. You can also hit the “…” icon under a tweet and select “Share via Direct Message.””. It’s now much easier to share public tweets via DMs on Twitter Mashable  [...]

Martin Beck says, “Twitter’s memory is about to get a lot better. The company announced today that it has indexed all public tweets and will be giving users the ability to search through the full body of Twitter’s roughly half trillion posts. Twitter’s search has long been incomplete because the company’s engineers focused on sifting through real-time output. The real-time search engine, an inverted index of about a week’s worth of tweets, has been supplemented since 2012 with about 2 billion “top tweets” and in 2013 that link was made more robust. Now Twitter has completed... [...]

Seth Fiegerman says, “Twitter‘s top execs sent a clear to message to Twitter analysts and investors on Wednesday: Yes, we really do have a plan. During the company’s first Analyst Day event in San Francisco, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo revealed plans to reduce the friction of onboarding new users by introducing an “instant timeline” feature that would make it easier for users to discover content on the social network right away, without having to go through the trouble of finding accounts to follow. “We believe that anyone should be able to come to Twitter and immediately... [...]