Photo Credit: Twitter
Twitter unveils a built-in Notes feature on the way, currently available to select users in the US, UK, Canada, and Ghana. Notes appear as long-form posts enabling a mixture of tweets, videos, and images.
Users with access to the feature have published Notes as examples, and Twitter shared an explanation as to how Notes work in two GIFs. The company says that people “in most countries” can read Notes on and off Twitter.
Leaks about the feature have circulated for months, including a report suggesting (and later confirming) that Twitter would unveil Notes soon. Screenshots have also circulated earlier this year showing the feature called Articles in some places and Notes in others.
Enabling long-form writing on Twitter has robust applications for drastically altering the platform’s trajectory. At first, tweets were only 140 characters in length before Twitter doubled that to 280 characters in 2017.
Still, it’s arguable that Twitter already has long-form content in threads of tweets or screenshots of writing in another app (such as the iOS Notes app). Incorporating official long-form posting into the platform brings a lot of value in making the text indexable for search and marketing purposes.
Such a feature could also see a lot of use as a newsletter. Twitter bought newsletter platform Revue in 2021, allowing the integration of Revue newsletters into Twitter profiles. However, that feature has yet to achieve popularity — a native feature allowing for long-form posts could go a long way toward filling in that void organically.
Should the Notes feature take off, it might sweeten the pot for billionaire Elon Musk. Musk is currently in the middle of a $44 billion buyout of Twitter but recently put the deal on hold. He stated that “three unresolved issues” prevented the deal from moving forward, including that the company refused to transparently reveal the number of spam bots and accounts on the platform.
Regardless, Musk’s deal with Twitter seems rocky at best in the face of other issues; the Tesla CEO says his factories are “losing billions of dollars” amid supply chain challenges.