Twitter has made several changes to its mobile apps in recent months, all with varying degrees of usability. Automatic captioning for videos arrived in December, an updated Explore tab went into testing the same month, and the mobile app stopped loading AMP pages in November (thank goodness). Now another feature is in the testing phase that is popular on video-centric social media: reaction videos.
The official Twitter support account posted on Thursday , “tweet response videos can now begin on Twitter! […]
When you tap the Retweet icon, choose “Quote Tweet with Comment” to create and customize your own Tweet recording – a response video (or photo) with the Tweet embedded.” The functionality is more or less identical to how Instagram, TikTok, and other social media apps already allow embedding posts in videos and images.
This could be another step towards Twitter to clone some of TikTok’s most-used features as TikTok’s popularity continues to soar – CloudFlare said TikTok surpassed Google as the most popular web domain in 2021. Embedded comments and posts are quite common on TikTok , and similar features have been around for years on other apps (including Instagram, owned by Meta). The recent Explore tab experiment turned tweets into full-screen displays with media stretched to fill the screen, similar to the main feed in TikTok.
The tweet didn’t mention when Twitter will start testing the functionality on Android, but it’s also possible that the feature will be phased out later rather than getting a wider rollout. Comment videos aren’t that common on Twitter, where most people prefer threading tweets (or linking to a TwitLonger, Medium, or some other form of blogging). Unsurprisingly, though, Twitter is at least trying the idea — the more popular TikTok gets, the more people seek out its features on other social media platforms.
Source: x da-developers
