Twitter announced today that it is streamlining its mobile offerings to emphasis search and discovery. Mobile users will now find discovery content in a single stream, while iOS users are getting a dedicated Search button.
The announcement comes in the form of a blog post from the social giant’s director of product management, Esteban Kozak, who says the company’s intention of making discovery overall easier for Twitter users. Fans will now be able to scroll through the Discover section, which highlights the biggest stories of the day according to who and what you follow, while also exploring Trends and Activity from the top of the tab.
Search, which already has a home on Android, now gets its own tab in iOS, allowing you to search for other users as well as trending topics. Previously, iOS users were obliged to dig through Discover tab, making it unintuitive and a little annoying to get at searchable content.
Finally, the Connect feature has been tweaked, focusing now on Interactions, or who specifically is interacting with the content you share via Favorites and Retweets. Perfect for all the narcissists out there.
Taken together, the tweaks makes clear that Twitter is putting content first in a big way, all in the hope of locking you into Twitter’s own social graph. Among the recent major tweaks Twitter has seen were updates to the iPad app and Web clients, highlighting new profile headers that were decidedly Facebook-esque. The company also updated photo and video viewing in media galleries last week, allowing users to quickly view videos posted from Vine, YouTube, and Vimeo alongside images without leaving the page.
Along with the release of Vine and even the breaking of Instagram functionality, Twitter is going to great pains to emphasize its own ecosystem, highlighting how users can find and share new content away from its competitors.
