A couple of months ago, Twitter announced that it intends to run experiments on some of its users - relax, there are no needles or electric shocks. But its mobile apps can now serve up different features to different subsets of users. There's been a steady drumbeat of rumors that Twitter is getting into messaging. But after playing with two different experimental builds for a bit, I think it might be more accurate to say it's getting into conversations.
Messaging - or one-on-one communications - is just part of the way you tend to talk to people. You also (and maybe even more commonly) talk to people in groups. And while the experimental apps certainly bring one-on-one conversations up front, they do more than that too. The main thing I've found in Twitter's experimental apps is that just about all forms of conversation have been moved to the forefront: the way you send and receive direct messages, see what your friends are up to, and take part in public conversations are all a lot more obvious.
It's interesting that Twitter is even able to deliver experimental versions of its apps. While A/B testing and delivering unique interfaces to individual users is pretty common on the Web, it's still unusual to see in an app.
But like a web page, an application is just a window that exposes data in a certain way. And Twitter found a way to change the view without changing the application itself. Despite appearances, there's really nothing structurally different about the experimental apps from the normal ones everyone else has - all are version 5.13.1. In short, it's one build, with at least three different user interfaces. Twitter is likely accomplishing this via server-side controls that let it turn on or off which timelines, icons, and features certain subsets of users see. But why?
On the normal Twitter app, there are four buttons across the bottom that lead to four different timelines: Home, Connect, Discover, and Me. They lead to the main timeline of tweets from people you follow, the timeline of interactions other people have taken on your tweets, a stream meant to surface tweets you haven't seen, and your own Twitter tweet history, respectively.
In the experimental builds, the buttons across the bottom lead to Timelines, Notifications, Messages, and Me. Me is exactly the same. Notifications is pretty much just Connect. It's the other two that are really interesting.
Timelines displays the same timeline you see in 'Home' on the normal app, but swipe to the right and you get an 'Activity' timeline that shows the things people in your network are favoriting and retweeting. It's like a chattier, real-time view of MagicRecs. On one build I've tried, you can also swipe to a third timeline: Discover. On the other build, there's no Discover at all.
(Another maybe negligible, maybe big, thing in these experimental versions? In one build, Discover is somewhat hidden away. In the other, it's completely absent. It's a reasonable assumption then that Twitter is at least mulling over killing it off.)
The main thing I've found using the new version is that the way you send and receive direct messages, see what your friends are up to, and take part in public conversations are all lot more obvious. That's especially true of messages. That dedicated button for messages (which Twitter, interestingly, isn't calling direct messages) is glaring at you all the time, inviting action.
It's a big change. Twitter had buried the direct message in previous versions of the app. It was hard to find, and hard to understand how to compose a new one. Now it's front and center, and meant to get you talking to people, directly, one-on-one, just as the Notifications tab is meant to get people interacting with each other publicly. Between Notifications and Messages, half of the app's buttons are devoted to conversations.
Moreover, this is just the latest in a string of experimental moves Twitter has made to get in on conversations this year. In August, it added a blue line connecting tweets in a conversation. People hated it, and they dialed it back some. Then in October, Twitter changed a longtime policy and let users opt-in to receive direct messages from people they do not follow. Previously, you had to have a reciprocal relationship on Twitter to send direct messages back and forth. It ended that a month later. Now the company prominently displays your unread direct message count across the top of its toolbar on the Web via a blue notification icon.
Twitter is clearly trying to get people to talk to each other and interact more; to converse rather than broadcast. There are a few competing visions for what Twitter is or can be used for. You can use it to blast links, to deliver news, to pass along things other people have said, to share pictures and songs and videos and all sorts of other things. But you can also use it just to talk. And really, that's where it seems like its greatest utility may be. For while Twitter may be more of an interest network than a social network, it is also true that it's at its most interesting when it's exploiting myriad social possibilities. Its in the company's interest to make Twitter a more conversational place.
Of course, as Twitter pointed out in that September blog post, these experiments may never go wide. (Pretty much the nature of an experiment!) Messages and Notifications may continue to live in a back corner of the app. But I kind of doubt that. And if it does intend to get into messaging in a big way, these application experiments, carried out on little control groups, seem like a clean way to get there without delivering a big shock to the entire system.
Mat Honan is a senior writer for Wired's Gadget Lab and the co-founder of the Knight-Batten award-winning Longshot magazine.
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