As part of its ongoing push to boost user engagement, Twitter is focusing on its unique position as a “live” platform for documenting events as they unfold.
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A Twitter spokesperson said in the statement that they are experimenting with a news experience on iOS and Android as they continue to explore new ways to surface the best content to users.
As reported by BuzzFeed, the new Twitter feature includes a list of trending news stories along with their headlines.
Twitter, Inc. has started testing a new “News tab” feature with users of its Android and iOS apps in the United States, which as the name suggests offers a service that provides breaking news to users. Users also can browse all headlines to see the number of top Tweets about a given story.
As soon as the user clicks on this news tab, he/she is given access to trending stories among all the major publications and news channels. The news tab doesn’t carry ads at this time.
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Without being able to play with the news tabs as it’s not now available outside of the United States, it does look fairly unobtrusive and if properly tailored to individual user preferences versus simply vanilla one size fits all news, it could actually be a seriously good value-add for the company. Twitter has released the News feature to a handful of users and there is no news when it will be launched for everyone else. With this act, millions of users might understand Twitter’s culture and move away from perplexity of which the company has been a victim of. “And that engine is powering mini-products with what is perhaps the best live feed of information in the world”.
