It’s been developing the option over the past few months, and now, it looks like Twitter’s new ‘Status’ feature may be nearing a release.
As you can see in these screenshots, posted by reverse engineering extraordinaire Jane Manchun Wong, the new ‘Status’ option would let you add a small, customizable status update into your tweets.
There’ll be a range of default status options, including ‘Shower Thoughts’, ‘Hot Take’ and ‘A Thread’, which could help to eliminate some of the common uses of emojis and other means to signify the same, giving you more characters to use for your actual tweet text.
There’ll also be a ‘Spoiler Alert’ option – though really, Twitter needs to employ the blackout text option available on Reddit, where the text of spoilers is covered, unless you choose to tap on it.
When someone posts a tweet with a status, you’ll be able to tap on that status indicator, which will take you through to a listing of all the tweets that have applied the same activity.
Initially, it had seemed that this new status option would be more pointed towards allocating an activity update to your tweets, which would lessen the need for people to add event hashtags to their username, for example, to show where they’re at.
That was seemingly the original inspiration for the option, when Twitter first previewed it back in 2018.
Since then, however, it’s gone through a few upgrades, and a few management changes, which now seems to have evolved it into more of a direct addition to the content of each specific tweet, as opposed to a general activity indicator.
As noted, various elements of the feature are now built into the back-end of the app, including this intro screen which was spotted by Alessandro Paluzzi last month.
It seems very close to launch, which could provide another prompt to get people engaging and interacting via tweet.
Or it could just be an extra distraction, which isn’t really necessary to facilitate the same. I mean, most Twitter users are already accustomed to habitual notes like ‘Thread’, so there’s not really a huge need, as such, for custom tags to signify them, while being able to see others who are posting ‘Hot Takes’ on any number of topics doesn’t really seem like an enhancement.
But maybe they will add new functional value, while also providing new tweet categorization options – so if you’re a fan of ‘Shower Thoughts’, then Twitter can show you more of them via its algorithmic process.
Hard to say, but it could add another prompt to get more people tweeting.