Some Twitter Users Frown on New Facebook-Like Features
March 27, 2014— -- Twitter is spreading its wings from 140-character bursts. The company has announced an update to its mobile apps that would give users more options when posting pictures on the social media giant, apparently borrowing some inspiration from that other social network, Facebook.
One of the new features is the ability to tag people in photos. The photo tags don't eat into Twitter's character limit, according to Cesar Puerta, a software engineer.
"You can tag up to 10 people in a photo and still have all 140 characters at your disposal," he writes on the company's blog.
The other big photo feature allows users to post up to four photos in a single tweet. The photos will join together like a small collage. The collage doubles as a mini-photo album, and users can tap to zoom in on one of the photos and swipe through to see the others.
Although Twitter officially announced its new photo features Wednesday, another possible update has been spotted in the wild. Some users have observed that instead of "retweeting" something to their followers, it would be "shared" instead.
They're both functionally the same, but the name change has gotten some Twitter users riled up for looking too much like Facebook.
Twitter declined to comment on the feature, but the company has said in the past that it's constantly tinkering around. "It's rare for a day to go by when we're not releasing at least one experiment," Alex Roetter, VP of engineering, said last year.
The new photo features are available on Twitter's iOS app today, and are expected to roll out for both Android and its website soon.
