With a stock price to think about, you can guarantee that Twitter executives are constantly exploring new ways to make the service more engaging, and the company’s latest innovation is view counts for your tweets. Currently being tested by a small number of users, the ‘views’ figure appears right underneath each update.
There’s been no word from Twitter itself about the new feature, which might be rolled out to everyone or abandoned completely at this stage. It’s an interesting idea though, giving users more of an insight into the size of the audience that’s seeing their tweets — are all of those followers you’ve racked up really checking up on what you have to say?
The experimental feature was first revealed by the Verge thanks to a tip-off from Twitter user Lydia J. We’ll have to wait and see whether Twitter deems it suitable for the masses, but one service that has definitely been killed off is the short-lived #Music discovery app that Twitter rolled out less than a year ago.
With low user numbers and very little promotion, the writing was on the wall for #Music, but Twitter has now decided to abandon it completely. The idea behind the app was to enable users to find new music tailored to their tastes based on their Twitter streams, but with big players such as Spotify, Apple and Google in the market it never got enough traction.
Active development on the app stopped several months ago and a tweet from the official account put the final nail in the coffin. Twitter #Music has now been pulled from the App Store, but if you have it installed you’ll be able to keep on using it until April 18. So, view counts in, music out — which direction will Twitter turn in next?
