The social network Twitter announced an update to its mobile apps that let users tag up to 10 people in any photo in a tweet. Additionally, the update also allow users to upload up to 4 photos at once.
Twitter introduced this feature on Wednesday, 26 March 2014. The feature made the microblogging site a little more photo-happy and friendly.
Uploading pictures to Twitter is never difficult. The process to do it is straightforward, both on the web and on mobile. But one thing it lacks is that share capability of the "usual" social media. Social media is now more than just sharing text messages, and Twitter as one of the major players knows that. With the internet now reaching more people and smartphones with camera are standard, pictures can now claim itself equal. With the new update, Twitter is giving users the ability to make their photos more useful.
The company said in a blog post that it's making photos "more social" with these new features.
Users can tag up to 10 people in a photo and it won't affect the 140 character word count for their tweet, affording users more space to caption the photo they're posting. To tag someone, users simply tap the "Who's in this photo?" button once the user attached a picture, and then type in the person's username.
Users can customize notifications and privacy options for who can tag them inside the Settings page in the app or on the web. The default setting for the photo tagging is "Allow anyone to tag me in photos." It can be changed so that only the people the user chooses that can tag, or it can be turned off completely. Users can also untag themselves if they want to. Tap the three dots below the tweet and select "Remove tag from photo." When a user is tagged in a photo, Twitter will send a notification. This can also be adjusted in Settings.
Previously, users could work around Twitter's lack of image tags by mentioning people from the photo in the tweet itself. But this decreases the already precious few characters to work with.
And finally, users can now add multiple images to a tweet - up to four at a time. The feature that is only available on the iPhone, and will roll out to the Android app and to Twitter.com soon. The company also now making it possible for the select images to tile into a neat rectangle. These elements will also show up in embedded tweets. Previously, only third-party apps that offers this feature.
Conclusion
Twitter's photo-tag is certainly inspired by Ellen Degeneres' group selfie in the Academy Awards that broke the "most retweeted" record. And with this new feature, users can easily identify the people inside the picture and follow them if they want. Twitter has traditionally struggled with discovery, and has experimented with many ways to show new users who to follow and why to follow them.
On the other hand, Twitter's photo and image sharing is not at all an innovation, let alone innovation. Facebook has offered photo tagging feature for a long time, and this feature is also being used by it's own Instagram since 2013. Social media companies seem to "borrow" each others' feature to make themselves more equipped for the battle between themselves. And photo-tagging is just another jump for Twitter between other major social networks.
Facebook had copied one of Twitter's most-known features when it added clickable hashtags. When Twitter added short, 6-second videos with its Vine service, Instagram quickly answered the call with its own 15-second videos feature.
But when it comes to Twitter, people know real-time information is what it excels. The photo-tagging feature will keep users to not lose their track of quality content over time.
Photo tags also give the company the ability to index photos by individual. While the ability to tag friends in photos is certainly useful and fun, Twitter now looks more like Facebook and Instagram than it ever has.