Twitter drops the egg avatar, supposedly to combat abuse

Twitter’s default egg avatar is the signal that the user who owns that account hasn’t uploaded a photo yet. It’s an integral part of Twitter’s identity. But it looks like Twitter is shedding this part of their image for two reasons. One is they want to replace it with a silhouette icon to encourage users to upload profile photos of themselves. Another is to combat abuse. Yes, you read that right. Twitter thinks since abusive accounts usually don’t upload profile photos and have the egg profile picture there is now “an association between the default egg profile photo and negative behavior.” While we don’t think that’s the actual solution to the issue, Twitter thinks it is. What they are doing though is taking out something that has been heavily identified with the service, which we think is a mistake.

Source: TechCrunch

Twitter won’t show notifications for threads from people you banned or muted

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After hearing out complaints from users, Twitter issued a quick announcement recently that users will no longer be notified about replies to conversations started by people you blocked or muted on the service. This, however, doesn’t extend to replies made by people you still follow who are in the same thread.

Twitter CEO gives us the ‘It’s complicated’ spiel for editable tweets

Safe to say, it’ll make our lives easier if Twitter opted to add an edit feature to our tweets. But apparently, it isn’t as easy as it would be but it looks like Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has been giving it some thought. When asking users what they want to see Twitter improve on, people are asking for the ability to edit. And Dorsey looks like he wants that for users, too. However, it doesn’t seem to be as easy a task or rather there are things to consider, including whether this should be for quickly editing mistakes or edit anytime.

Adding this feature will require work on the backend but it’ll also affect how the service works. As The Verge points out, what if someone edited an old tweet that you retweeted and it turns out different from what you wanted to share. It’ll take a lot of work on Twitter’s part to see how this can be implemented. But it looks like they are at least thinking about this.

@michaelpachter I'm listening. And what do you want from edit? Quickly fix mistakes or edit anytime?

— jack (@jack) December 29, 2016

Periscope gets 360-degree livestreaming

Not to be left behind by Facebook, Twitter is offering “select partners” a chance to livestream 360-degree videos on the Periscope platform. Much like how it works on Facebook, you’ll be able to see all of what the camera catches by moving the phone around or tapping and scrolling through the screen of your phone. On the desktop, you just click and drag to see what’s happening. There will be a badge that shows up on Periscope and Twitter to show if someone is livestreaming a 360-degree video. The feature is rolling out to users now so just wait for it to head your way.

If you’re a creator and interested in streaming, Periscope seems to be promoting the Insta360 Nano camera. But if you want to use other 360-degree cameras, the company said you can experiment with these using the Periscope Producer service. However, just because you’re a creator and have a 360-degree camera, it doesn’t mean you can start streaming. Periscope hasn’t given the names of the partners it’s working with at the moment. But they’ve said interested parties can join the waitlist. Periscope hasn’t specified either if this will be a creator-exclusive feature or if it’ll open it to more users.

Source: VentureBeat