The popular microblogging site Twitter announced yesterday that it is discontinuing its CoTweeting feature after seven months of user testing and trials.
The feature was first created to aid users in expanding their user bases, reaching new audiences, and strengthening their relationships with other accounts—a novel approach for users to work together on the microblogging platform.
The feature is, however, no longer available to create since Tuesday and already existing CoTweets will only be available and viewable for one more month, after which it will be converted to retweets.
For the last several months we’ve been testing a new way to Tweet together using CoTweets. We’re sad to say that the current experiment is coming to an end.
The company said on its support page for CoTweets.
“We appreciate the feedback we’ve been given about CoTweets and we’re still looking for ways to implement this feature moving forward. We thank you for trying CoTweets and we’ve enjoyed watching all of your creativity with this feature come to life!”, it added.
Although according to a tweet by Elon Musk, he said the company discontinued the feature to “focus on enabling writers to add essays as attachments to tweets.” This is another feature the tech guru is looking to launch next week. The idea is to enable direct platform publishing and payment for creators.
Read Also: Elon Musk’s style has made Twitter more dangerous, the former top official explains
What is the CoTweets feature?
A CoTweet feature is one that allows two people to co-author a tweet that is posted simultaneously to both author’s profiles and followers’ timelines. CoTweets help authors share the spotlight, unlock opportunities for engaging new audiences and enhance their established partnerships.
It works very easily as one author needs to create the CoTweet and initiate an invite to the co-author. Once it has been accepted, the CoTweet is immediately posted to each author’s profile and can’t be edited after publication.
The feature can not be shared in your inner circles on Twitter like Twitter Circle and Communities. It can only be sent to people who follow you and have a public account. The feature was also available for Twitter Blue subscribers in specific regions.
Moving on, the idea of Twitter’s long-form content feature
This is not the first feature Elon Musk is discontinuing since he took over the platform. Asides, from cutting down its workforce and sacking C-Suites members, the Twitter owner has also revamped the platform, discontinuing many features, including ad-free articles, Twitter Tiles, and even Twitter Notes.
Before Elon Musk’s takeover, Twitter had the idea of introducing a long text format called Twitter Notes, which will allow users to create articles using rich formatting and uploaded media.
In June 2022, the microblogging site planned to merge its newsletter subscription into TwitterWrite, a brand to create long-form writing efforts. After the takeover, Elon Musk still had plans for the long text attachments.
In November 2022, Elon Musk looked to add a feature that will allow users to attach long-form text to tweets to end the absurdity of notepad screenshots. In his tweet, he hinted that it would be similar to Twitter Notes.
In December 2022, a Twitter designer hinted that Twitter is planning to increase the character limit for tweets, which will support the direct publishing of long-form content on its platform.
With this CoTweet feature discontinued, we are looking at the next feature Elon Musk and the Twitter team is looking to launch in the coming weeks.
Read Also: What Elon Musk’s Twitter monetisation for creators could look like
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