Will Twitter 2.0 be the Long Overdue Upgrade?

Twitter recently made the big announcement of a major overhaul, since it hasn’t had any major upgrades in the recent past. Since TweetDeck’s acquisition by Twitter in 2011 the app has, more or less, remained the same apart from a few new functions the company ported. It has taken a decade for the company to announce the revamp of the application, which will definitely be a welcome change to the users.

Twitter has been the crossroads of interests and controversies for celebrities, politicians, and regulators; therefore, it is very important for Twitter to carefully moderate the changes it is going to bring to the application. In an interview, Kayvon Beykpour, product chief, said that the company is planning to share more information about the on-going overhaul project with the public later this year. The current (original) version of the application features a simple vertical grid view for various Twitter feeds.

Beykpour shared in the interview that the company has not shown a lot of love to TweetDeck in the recent past and it is working on it from the ground up, which will go public later this year. The reason for such a long wait for the upgrade is believed to be the missteps the company had taken in the past and sorting the prioritization. The initiation to revamp the TweetDeck is allegedly part of a comprehensive push to improve Twitter’s developer tools and mend their relationship with the app developers. However, for the past year and a half, the company has stepped up in commitment and follow-through on innovating around the API once again.

Twitter is on the path to earn their trust with app developers because of their past mistakes and is keen on investing in the reparation process. The company is hoping that this time around the app developers will have the freedom to develop interesting paraphernalia around the Twitter ecosystem, which would feature a refreshing outlook to the application. The company believes that it would not be where it is today if the app developers did not do their cool things.

A couple of weeks ago Twitter had its Analyst Day event in an attempt to deepen its roots into three of its pillars, which are, health, conversations, and interests. Last year, the company launched a product called ‘Topics’ under the “Interest” category, which was nascent, but it intently accelerated the new product and now it has around 6000 topics for people to follow. With the launch of the ‘Topics’ product, people can now follow a specific topic rather than just people and Twitter will recommend the best content under the specific topic promptly.

On the technical front, it is not sure if the new TweetDeck would feature new features, a refreshed visual design or both. Bloomberg’s last month report said that the company was considering a premium version of the TweetDeck and could assign a subscription fee for it. Another update from Twitter about one of its future products is ‘Spaces’ under the “Conversation” banner. Spaces will be a new and intuitive way for people to talk about current events on Twitter. Spaces will allow you people to have actual audio-based conversations rather than using limited characters or videos.

Looks like Twitter is headed the right way in reinventing itself for a future-ready population. Sure enough, it took almost a decade to do this, but it is going all in to upgrade itself for better and cover all bases. With an overview of the new products and features Twitter has in the pipeline, we are sure that Twitter 2.0 will take social media to a whole new level.