Twitter’s latest curious idea is a limited test of retweets with video to react to tweets , which will allow users to be much more expressive. Text retweets are widely used, so now their possibilities are expanded.
A few months ago Twitter closed Fleets, its version of Stories, but it seems willing to reuse its previous work. Video reactions are posted on the main timeline permanently , like other retweets, but the concept is similar to what we saw in Fleets.
Basically, we will be able to record a video with the reaction and the embedded tweet , so that the context is not lost. If we prefer, it is possible to take a photo, although it may not be as useful.
The microblogging platform has shared how the ability to react on retweets is used:
For now this novelty is in testing only for iOS , where an option to “Quote tweet with reaction” appears if we press the retweet icon. At that moment, the internal Twitter camera opens to take a photo or record a video.
The original tweet will be overlaid on the photo or video , with the option to reposition, rotate or resize it. Not all iOS users have this possibility yet, and it seems that the social network decides on its own who is part of the test group.
It is common for Twitter to conduct experiments with a limited number of users of certain platforms. It almost always ends up releasing these functions, sometimes with improvements over the initial concept, although we should not take it for granted.
Twitter traditionally works better with text than with multimedia elements, something the company wants to change. In fact, Instagram’s plans for 2022 also include much more video, perhaps because it is a more versatile format for advertising.
The new Twitter video reactions are interesting , and of course offer more possibilities than the future reactions that WhatsApp is preparing, so it remains to be seen if they work well and reach all users.
