At its core, Twitter hasn’t changed all that much in the past few years. For the most part, people use it the same as they always have — a mostly public-facing ‘microblogging’ platform. But the company today unveiled highlighted multiple upcoming features that could significantly change the way people interact with one another on the platform, in many ways making it more versatile — and more like some of its competitors.
The announcements came as part of Twitter’s ‘Analyst Day.’ here are some of the biggest ones.
Communities
Communities is essentially the Twitter version of Facebook Groups. It allows Twitter users to hubs where they can gather based on common interests or locations, an extension of the company’s current topics feature.
Per Twitter, Communites will make it “easier for people to form, discover, and participate in conversations that are more targeted to the relevant communities or geographies they’re interested in.” Twitter showed off some hypothetical groups around social justice, plants, cats, and surfing.
Super Follows
A litter Patreon, and a little Twitch, Super Follows allows Twitter users to, well, become ‘super followers’ of their favorite online accounts. Some of the exclusive perks Twitter is teasing include exclusive content and newsletters, discounts, supporter badges, and super-followers-only conversations.
It could help creators monetize their Twitter following, without asking people to leave the platform. The company also teased some kind of tipping feature for creators, but did not provide much details about how it would work. It did have a $4.99 /month subscription price in a mockup though.
These new features aside, Twitter also highlighted a couple of upcoming features that have been making the rounds the last few months.
Revue
Instead of removing character limits, Revue is a way for Twitter users to publish newsletters for their audiences — these can be free or be behind a paywall. Finally, there’ll be a place for you stick your lengthiest tweetstorms.
The feature was technically announced last month, as it comes after Twitter acquired a company named, you guessed it, Revue.
Spaces
This one isn’t totally new for people who follow social media closely, but it’s essentially Twitter’s version of Clubhouse. In other words, it’s a place where you can actually talk to people using honest-to-goodness audio, although it features live AI captions for conversations as well.
The company has been testing Spaces since at least December, and the feature even has its own Twitter profile.
There’s no word on exactly when these features will land, but considering some of them are already being tested publicly, I’d guess sooner rather than later.