Saturday, April 28, 2012

Twitter updates its iOS and Android applications

Twitter has updated its iOS and Android applications and along with minor appearance changes, the services included in the apps are more streamlined with the services included on their website. Just like Twitter for web, where you have tabs for Connect, Discover and your homepage of tweets, the applications now include buttons that offer the same features. The Discover tab in the app allows you to find timely content that is interesting and that matters to you. In the Discover section, you'll see Activity, which, like the web counterpart, allows you to see tweets that are retweeted or favourited by the people you follow as well as which accounts your followers start following and if they've added any new accounts to any of their lists. Activity appears right below the redesigned stories in Discover. You can tap any story to see any trend or news article. You can then read the entire story or join the conversation by replying, retweeting or favouriting related Tweets. 

Twitter also says that search is now simpler on their apps for iOS and Android. Within the Connect tab, you can start typing the first name, last name or username of someone you're looking for and the name will autocomplete for the people you follow. Furthermore, you can now also see different versions of spelling and related terms for some queries that you might be looking for. Twitter has also added a new feature specifically for the iPhone app. When you tap the search box to perform a search in the application, you'll see your most recent queries. You can also go directly to someone's profile when you search for their username in Connect.

Finally, Twitter updated the way it notifies you about people connecting with you. When you are retweeted, favourited, or when someone new starts following you, Twitter wants to let you know immediately by enabling Push Notifications. You can customize your Push Notification settings to get only the alerts that you want. Twitter says that these updates were a collaboration between many teams at Twitter including Android, iOS, Discover, Search and others. To download Twitter for your respective Android and/or iOS device go to Google Play or the iOS App Store.

Twitter also recently updated TweetDeck to extend its web services to the desktop and mobile application. TweetDeck was acquired by Twitter last year and now also contains Twitter's Connect and Discover functions, among others. Twitter's mobile applications came from the company's acquisition of Tweetie and it seems clear that Twitter wants all its mobile counterparts to be exact representations of its web functions.

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