Twitter adds audio-only live broadcasts for iOS

Sometimes you want to go live but don’t want to record your surroundings. Twitter just launched an audio-only live broadcast option for its iOS and Periscope app users. It acts similar to a regular live broadcast on the social network without videos attached to it. For iOS and Periscope users, you just need to tap on the “Live” button and from there you’ll get an option to broadcast using audio only. While being able to record is limited to iOS for the time being, all Twitter users can listen in on these broadcasts. Once a live broadcast is done, these can be made available to listen to afterwards.

People might see when you’re online on Twitter soon

Twitter hopes that the new feature its testing will make you want to interact or converse more on its platform. The company’s director of product management, Sara Haider, revealed threaded conversations and status indicators, which makes the app look rather similar to Facebook’s comment threads. Threaded conversations make sense to make it easier to follow conversations. But we wonder how people will feel about having their status displayed on the platform. As The Verge points out, it might not be the best move with trolls using this feature as a way to get their replies and tweets seen by their targets. If you have any thoughts about these new features, you can reply to Haider’s tweet on the subject.

hey Twitter. we've been playing with some rough features to make it feel more conversational here. presence and reply threading. still early and iterating on these ideas. thoughts? pic.twitter.com/3U3NvpHWPy

— Sara Haider (@pandemona) August 31, 2018

Report claims Twitter crackdown resulted in 70 million suspended account in past two months

Twitter is cleaning house and according to a report in The Washington Post this has resulted in the suspension of 70 million accounts in the past couple of months. It’s part of the social network’s plan to lessen the flow of disinformation as well as the malicious activity that has been plaguing Twitter. This rate of suspension is reportedly twice that of the company’s October 2017 suspension rate. This change could result in the decline in users for the second quarter of the year. But a Twitter executive told publication that a lot of these accounts rarely tweeted so the move won’t dramatically affect Twitter’s active user count.

Twitter, alongside Facebook, have been heavily criticized and demanded by users and the general public to put a stop to the trolls, spam, and spread of disinformation on its platform. Last month, Twitter said in a blog post that it’s been improving its safety policies and its “systems identified and challenged more than 9.9 million potentially spammy or automated accounts per week.”

Need a new Twitter client for the Apple Watch? Try Chirp

After Twitter pulled its official app for Apple Watch, Australian developer Will Bishop saw this as an opportunity to develop a third-party client for the social network on Apple’s smartwatch. Twitter has not taken kindly to third-party clients so we won’t know how long this one will be up. But for now iOS users have Chirp as an option. This lets users quickly reply to Twitter notifications, browse your timeline, catchup on trends, view people’s profiles, and many more. You can customize the app’s interface too by toggling on or off different elements like Images, Retweet Counter, Like Counter, Retweet & Like Buttons, and Timestamps. This will show you what you want to see and help declutter the Watch’s tiny screen.

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