New Twitter Photo Features: Testing with Celebs

Twitter hasn’t done nearly enough to the image and video ends of their service. They have improved their direct message character limit, and they have started to work on anti-troll safety measures, but Twitter photo features have just been there. Months can go by before you spot an update.

But if you followed celebrities during the MTV Video Music Awards, you might have noticed quite a few new things. If you logged in to find out if you could do the same things, you would, in all likelihood, have been disappointed. If you weren’t, you should know that you are very special. But Twitter might have given us a sneak peek of what’s to come when it unrolled a few features reminiscent of Snapchat as celebrities tweeted their way through VMAs.

If you’ve been following the US Open, you will have noticed that a few of the top players are also playing around with a few new photo features that you don’t have.

Director of Entertainment Talent, Lara Cohen, seemed to confirm that celebs were getting first crack at a few great new features for Twitter photos. So far, we don’t know if this is a separate app that was developed to add new features of it’s some kind of add-on to Twitter’s photo and video features on the Twitter mobile apps, but something is definitely going on.

Here is what we noticed so far:

• Metadata giving you information like which app the tweet was posted from was wiped. Taylor Swift tweeted videos without any indication that they were from TweetDeck.
• You can make gifs.
• You can add stickers, like Snapchat.
• You can doodle.
• There might be filters.
• Emojis will be featured.

This seems to be Twitter finally deciding that while the world’s narcissism could keep Twitter going with just tweets, images and videos are the future. The new gif-making feature, especially, could be aimed at Tumblr. Tumblr is where you will find gifs as often as you will find selfies.

However, these features are not out for commoners like us at the moment. If you want to post a gif on Twitter, you have to go through Giphy, but since Twitter has a partnership with Giphy now, you can post directly from that tool.

Until the features get rolled out to more people, we won’t know exactly what all Twitter’s latest ambitious improvement can do. But we do know that if it’s taking on Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat with these features, Twitter had better get its game face on!