A new Status feature has started appearing for some Twitter users that allows them to assign one of several pre-written tags to their tweets. A company spokesperson confirmed the limited testing statement to TechCrunchTwitter users share screenshots of the feature in action.
“For a limited time, we’re testing a feature that lets you add a status topic to your Tweets from a predefined list to provide more context for your followers,” a Twitter spokesperson said. “So whether you’re about to drop a hot Tweet topic, share your thoughts about the shower, or have a bad Monday, your Tweets can better communicate what you’re up to.”
How Twitter managed to release a more embarrassing and useless feature than cotweets in the same month, I don’t know, but here goes. these are all the statuses you can use. custom statuses are not allowed pic.twitter.com/2BPwku1qi1
— Buys from Vesperia (@coolranchzaku) July 27, 2022
Screenshots of the feature show that many of the statuses are meant to replace the captions and emojis that Twitter users often put at the start of their tweets and Twitter threads. The thread has a status of “A thread” which includes a Spool emoji, a “Spoiler alert” with a Warning Sign emoji, or an “AMA” with a microphone. In theory, placing this information in Status should save valuable characters from users’ tweets.
The in-development feature was previously spotted in Twitter’s code by software researcher Jane Manchun Wong. At the time, Statuses could be posted to either a tweet or a public profile, but this latest test only allows users to add them to specific tweets. You can click on a status to find other tweets that contain the same words.
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If this feature reminds you of old LiveJournal or old AIM statuses, we won’t blame you. But more interesting is the feature’s roots in Twitter’s own history. into blog post over a decade ago, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone highlighted how the platform was originally envisioned as a “mobile status update service” designed to allow people to share whatever they want, whenever they want. However, since 2009, Stone said, Twitter has outgrown that original purpose and served more as a general-purpose information network. The new Status feature doesn’t seem like it’s going to reverse that trend, but it does revive Twitter’s old purpose a bit.
There’s no word on whether the status feature will be rolled out more widely, or even when. It’s part of a growing list of developing features on the social media network, including mixed media tweets it can allow you to add both images and video to a post, volume down buttonand selection reward tweets.
