Watch out for a lightning bolt icon on Twitter this year.
Twitter plans to launch a new feature that will allow people on the site, even if they’re not logged into their accounts, to see a collection of the best or relevant tweets about events in individual streams.
A team of editors at Twitter will help pick out these tweets, which will be identified by a lightning bolt icon, to package in one place.
This direction and experience is bold and uniquely Twitter! Follow events as they unfold, even when logged out. ⚡️ https://t.co/Ji4Oykk12K
— Jack (@jack) June 18, 2015
The effort has been dubbed “Project Lightning” and Kevin Weil, who oversees new products at Twitter told BuzzFeed “It’s a brand-new way to to look at tweets.”
From live sports to award shows, people turn to Twitter to have real-time conversations about events as they’re unfolding. But even through clicking hashtags, it can be hard for users to find tweets that they want to read.
“It’s around anything that’s interesting,” Weil told BuzzFeed. “It could be current events. It could be breaking news. It could be awards shows or sports. But also cultural events and moments — things around your location and where you are. There’s amazing content, for example, posted to Throwback Thursday every single Thursday. But it’s hard to discover it; you have to work as a user to go and find the best stuff, but [we] can do it easily and can package it richly.”
The San Francisco company also unveiled a redesigned homepage this year that allows people to browse tweets by topic without logging into the site and struck a deal with Google so tweets show up in a search.
Some people, including investors and analysts, have criticized the microblogging site for being too difficult to use and slow to release new features compared to other social networks such as Facebook.
Departing Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, who will step down on July 1 and said this week at the Bloomberg Technology Conference that new products will roll out in the fall, told BuzzFeed that the new feature isn’t a response to recent criticism.
“It’s been in the works for a long, long time,” he told BuzzFeed.
Photo Credit: Twitter icon on the iPhone. Laura A. Oda/Bay Area News Group