Twitter is getting rid of the weird “.@” requirement to make responses public
Twitter has been in sort of a funk lately. In what could only be described as an identity crisis, we’ve watched as a constant flow of new features and UI tweaks are slowly bringing the social network closer to rivals like Facebook. In fact, their most recent changes — announced earlier today — even brings a Facebook-like “Top Stories” to timelines.
Today, Twitter released their Q4 2015 earnings report and although they managed to pull in $710 million in revenue, new user growth has flat lined. Up 9% over the previous year, Twitter’s 320 million monthly active users is actually the same number as it was the previous quarter’s. Not a good look to investors.
In an effort to make things less confusing for new users (and hopefully get that active monthly user number up), Twitter announced another change that will be arriving soon. It involves doing away with that weird “.@” requirement users have to type in order to make sure a tweeted response shows up in their follower’s timeline. It doesn’t sound like a huge change but depending on how it’s implemented, could drastically alter the way users the social network.
Twitter says the upcoming change will be just one of a few “broken windows” they hope to fix in order to drive better growth and make things easier on users.