Twitter for iOS has received some big updates today.
First and foremost, the app has been completely redesigned, and now includes three different timelines. The first, “Home,” is the same Twitter experience everyone is used to. The next two, however, are focused on giving users a glimpse of other tweets they might be interested in. “Discover” aggregates top news stories and tweets that have been favorited or promoted by people a user follows, while “Activity” shows how people a user follows interact with other accounts.
Discover feels the most like the News Feed, especially given Facebook’s renewed emphasis on promoting news articles inside their users’ feeds.
While the update is clearly focused on getting users to expand their network on Twitter, it also comes with an option that restricts activity notifications to just those from users someone follows. In other words, it’s now possible to stop those quasi-English weight loss advertisements from showing up along with @replies from your friends.
In addition, Twitter has now added the ability for users to view images as a part of direct messages, something that hasn’t been possible in the past, and seems like a move to help the company compete with other networking applications like Snapchat, WhatsApp and Facebook, which all offer different but robust takes on sending messages between friends.
If you don’t already have it, you can download Twitter from the App Store.
