Twitter’s new textual content formatting choices are a step nearer, with the up to date, native textual content show choices now moving through to the pre-deployment stage within the app.
As you possibly can see on this tweet from app researcher Alessandro Paluzzi, tweets will quickly have daring, italic and underline choices inside the tweet composer window, offering new methods to decorate up your phrases.
Twitter chief Elon Musk flagged the coming addition back in January, when he additionally famous that font dimension would quickly be one other non-compulsory consideration. That doesn’t seem like a part of this preliminary launch, at the very least at this stage.
Twitter designer Andrea Conway shared a preview of what impression the replace may have on tweet timelines final month.
Which doesn’t look nice – however in all probability, most individuals received’t use these formatting choices, so it most likely received’t spark an enormous shift in utilization, and received’t result in a tweet mess like this.
In all probability.
The principle intention of the replace is to supply extra methods for customers to share longer messages within the app, with Musk aiming to facilitate long-form content material, in an effort to get extra creators posting extra of their materials by way of tweet, versus linking off to a different third-party website.
Twitter has already prolonged the utmost tweet size for Twitter Blue subscribers to 4,000 characters, and is contemplating upping that once more to 10,000, whereas it’s additionally engaged on a brand new in-app keyboard show that might enable users to add line breaks into their longer tweets to make them extra readable in-stream.
Throughout the context of tremendous lengthy tweets, textual content formatting makes extra sense – and actually, you possibly can already make the most of a majority of these formatting capabilities in tweets proper now anyway, as Twitter supports Unicode functionality.
It’s simply not native, and never intuitive. Making it extra instantly accessible will certainly see extra individuals utilizing daring and italics, which might be a mistake – however possibly, as famous, within the context of extra artistic choices, significantly for longer tweets, possibly it is smart.
It appears we’re going to seek out out both method, with Twitter shifting to the following stage of experimentation with the choice, which may see it shifting to reside manufacturing quickly. It’s not 100% clear but if this might be typically accessible or a Twitter Blue unique.