The second edition of Twitter’s developers’ conference, Flight, is slated to be held in San Francisco on October 21. The event aims to contribute towards the microblogging site’s recent sustained efforts to widen its user base. Considering Twitter’s inability to catch up with arch rival Facebook in terms of revenue generation or attracting new users, its reliance on an event of this nature is not in the least surprising. After all, developer conferences have become the latest fad for tech companies that have been using them as a platform to make new announcements and introduce new features for their products and services.
As Flight enters its second year, it is likely that Twitter will make its developer conference an annual event, following the lead of other tech giants such as Apple, Google and Facebook. The exact agenda for the conference has not been revealed yet. However, experts believe Flight 2.0 will be packed with new key announcement. Of these, the three most anticipated and crucial ones include:
Improved Accessibility for New Users
Given that lagging behind in user growth has been Twitter’s biggest woe lately, the thrust of this conference will be on offering innovative solutions to improve the site’s accessibility for new users. In order to achieve this, the company is aggressively testing what is being called the ‘instant timeline’. This new feature is being introduced keeping in mind that a lot of new users get lost trying to find the right people to follow, which often results in inactivity on users’ account, making them walk away soon after signing up on the site. Twitter has now taken the onus of helping its new users find suitable Twitter accounts to follow.
Direct Sale of Retail Items: ‘Buy Button’ for Twitter?
E-commerce has invaded social media in a big way and Twitter wants to tap this opportunity to its full potential. Breaking away from its image as the platform that sets agenda for talking points and debates across the globe, the site is now aiming to look at its users as consumers. In addition to the current practice of showcasing promotional tweets and links to e-commerce and business sites, Twitter is looking to include a way to promote direct selling of items. The company is actively testing ways and means to highlight specific products on the site and display them to a targeted audience.
Project Lightning Feature
The microblogging site has come up with a ground-breaking feature to help its users track important events in a more cohesive manner. The all-new feature, so far being called Project Lightning, provides an all-in-one stop relevant to find search results for important events worldwide. When a user searches for a particular event, all the related photos, tweets and video will be presented on a single screen. The new feature will help users track scheduled events and developing news stories with a single click, thereby eliminating the need to visit different sites and sources to gather information related to any event. Once the feature is made functional, the Twitter mobile app will display a new icon that can be tapped to access a page listing all major events unfolding around the world.
Besides these key expected announcement, Twitter is likely to introduce a wide range of new tools at the conference and make them available to other developers.
Image: Twitter
