Source: The Indian Express
Reports from this week suggest that Twitter is shifting its employees from prominent consumer-facing features such as communities, audio Spaces, and newsletters. Instead, the reports noted how the social media platforms is planning to refocus its efforts on user personalisation. Evidently, these updates occur as Twitter faces increased negativity surrounding its every move owing to Musk’s pending buyout.
Moreover, this comes just a few weeks following its chief executive Parag Agrawal made an announcement regarding a halt on most hiring at the company. Moreover, they even went on to fire both the consumer product leader of Twitter, Kayvon Beykpour, along with the leader on revenue side, Bruce Falck. Reportedly, this restructuring is taking place within the company under Jay Sullivan’s direction. Sullivan is the new head of product, as well as the interim head of revenue at Twitter.
A spokesperson from the social media company gave in a statement regarding this development. They noted how Twitter is ‘making some updates’ to the roadmap and team structure of their ‘consumer product.’ They stated how this was so that the company could ‘better focus’ on the spheres that could positively impact the ‘public conversation.’ However, the spokesperson did not specify exactly what the changes Twitter aimed to work on.
“We are making some updates to our consumer product team structure and roadmap to better focus on the areas that will have the greatest positive impact to the public conversation.”
Back in 2021, Beykpour’s statement seemed to indicate that Twitter had seemingly lined up to taken on companies such as Substack, Clubhouse, and Patreon. Moreover, then they also had competition from more companies such as Meta’s Facebook in these spheres. However, currently Meta’s newsletter number do not look impressive as such, and it has since given up on trying to build a range of audio feature.
Apparently, the only feature from the social media platform thats seems like it’s certainly in development is the edit button announced earlier in 2022. According to the details uncovered by Jane Manchun Wong, the feature would enable tweets to be edited within a specific period of time of the initial post. Moreover, she specified how the edited tweet would retain a copy of the original post, along with its entire history.
How an edited Tweet looks like on Twitter Web App: pic.twitter.com/boouYlvhA3
— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) May 2, 2022
Moreover, Twitter Inc made an announcement this week regarding an end date for TweetDeck’s availability for Mac. However, its is not know if this is somehow related to this shifting of teams. One new development which could be a part of one of the ‘positive changes’ is expanding tests of the Twitter Circle, along with its Birdwatch fact-checking setup.
