The battle between social media giants, Twitter and Facebook, continues. This year, Facebook introduced two popular Twitter features – hashtag and member authentication.
Now, it is the turn of Twitter. The microblogging site has announced the rolling out of a new and very exciting feature – Twitter conversations. This feature will allow people to build conversations around news and ideas as they happen.
You can say that this is already happening on Twitter. Yes. It is. But very often scores of tweets are lost in the tweet storm.
Twitter too acknowledges this fact. It writes on its blog : “To date, such exchanges haven’t always been easy to follow. With this in mind, we’ve now made it easier for you to see conversations as they’re taking place.”
Now, the tweets will get linked – and the linking will be visible.
How the conversations will happen
1. Follow the thread: A blue thread will now connect Tweets made by members you follow. You will now see three tweets in your home timeline. These tweets will be in sequence; so, you will know who is saying what as the Twitter conversation unfolds.
2. Find replies: You can dig deeper, and check replies. To do so, you only need to tap on a tweet. All replies will show up in your Twitter window. These will also include replies from members you don’t follow.
3. Join the conversation: You can click reply to join the Twitter conversation. Your reply will be seen on your timeline by people who follow you, and, of course, by the person you responded to.
Twitter made this announcement on its blog on August 28 with the promise that it will start rolling out the conversations feature from that day itself.
It will be interesting to see how this feature plays out, once it is rolled out fully. But it surely promises to make conversations bloom on Twitter.