Highlights:
Twitter is working on a Snapchat or Instagram-like “News Camera” feature that will allow Twitterati to capture photos, videos, and Live broadcasts as well as overlay the content with captions before sharing it on their timelines. The move could be aimed at garnering more users at a time when people are using Instagram Stories feature frequently. The development was first spotted by social media consultant Matt Navarra a week ago.
The camera seems to work like the way it works on Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat, that is, by swiping left from the homescreen. Reportedly, after shooting some media, the overlays pop-up prompting the user to add a location and a caption to describe the content that they have captured. Reverse engineering expert Jane Manchun Wong says that the UI of the camera “looks suspiciously similar to Facebook Camera / Instagram Stories Camera”.
Wong also said that Twitter was careful enough to not to leak the News Camera on Android and Navarra accessed the feature on iOS. She also says that the posts which are created by the News Camera will be called “Moments”. There are no details about whether the posts/stories created by the “News Camera” would stay after 24 hours or if they would just vanish like they do in Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat.
Meanwhile, Twitter confirmed to TechCrunch that it is indeed working on the feature. “I can confirm that we’re working on an easier way to share thing like images and videos on Twitter. What you’re seeing is in mid-development so it’s tough to comment on what things will look like in the final stage. The team is still actively working on what we’ll actually end up shipping. Unfortunately we don’t have a timeline right now. You could expect the first half of this year,” a Twitter spokesperson was quoted as saying.
Recently, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said that the company is working on a feature that will give users the “ability to edit, like if you make a typo or something like that. But also the ability for people to see the original”. “Once you send a text, you can’t take it back. So when you send a tweet it goes to the world instantaneously. You can’t take it back. You could build it as such so maybe we introduce a 5-second to 30-second delay in the sending. And within that window, you can edit. The issue with going longer than that is it takes that real-time nature of the conversational flow out of it,” Dorsey explained the reason for not having an edit option yet.
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