Twitter UX changes
What is this? A crowdsourced list of Twitter UX changes.
Why? Computational social analyses of Twitter data might be affected by UI and UX changes. Check your findings against this list to see if observed effects could be driven by interface changes.
What is included? All visible change to the interface and user interaction. Back-end changes are not listed here.
Contributions are welcome!
See also https://github.com/igorbrigadir/twitter-history for a similar list.
List of changes
| Date | Change | Source |
|---|---|---|
| October 2006 | @replies becomes a convention | Twitter timeline |
| October 2006 | $cashtags first emerge | Twitter timeline |
| November 2006 | Favorites introduced | Twitter timeline |
| April 2007 | Retweets become a convention | Twitter timeline |
| August 2007 | #hashtags emerge as a primary tool for searching and organizing Tweets | Twitter timeline |
| May 2009 | Beta version of retweet introduced, as @ prepended to Tweet body | Twitter timeline |
| June 2009 | Verified account introduced | Twitter timeline |
| October 2009 | "Lists" added | Twitter timeline |
| November 2009 | Geo-tagging added | Twitter blog |
| August 2010 | Tweet button added for websites, facilitating sharing | Twitter timeline |
| May 2011 | Follow button added for websites, facilitating following | Twitter timeline |
| August 2011 | Native photos introduced | Twitter timeline |
| June 2012 | $sashtags become a clickable/searchable link | Twitter timeline |
| March 2014 | Photos tagging added | Twitter blog |
| April 2014 | Emojis become natively supported | Twitter timeline |
| April 2015 | Change in "post tweet" UX reduces geo-tagging | Twitter timeline |
| October 2015 | Twitter polls added | Twitter blog |
| November 2015 | Favorites replaced by hearts | |
| February 2016 | Native searchable gifs introduced | Twitter blog |
| June 2016 | Native video supported | Twitter blog |
| June 2016 | Quote retweet generally available | Twitter timeline |
| June 2016 | Stickers in picture introduced | Twitter blog |
| September 2016 | Photos, videos, GIFs, polls, and Quote Tweets no longer count toward 140 characters limit | |
| March 2017 | Replies can use full 140 characters, dropping all in-tweet meta-data | Twitter blog |
| January 2017 | Exploration tab + trending feature on iOS and Android | Twitter blog |
| June 2017 | Re-design of Twitter for iOS, Twitter for Android, TweetDeck, and Twitter Lite | Twitter blog |
| November 2017 | Increased tweet length to 280 characters | Twitter blog |
| December 2017 | Native thread support | Twitter blog |
| Febuary 2018 | Bookmarks added | Twitter blog |
| November 2019 | Topics introduced | Twitter blog (More details) |
| May 2020 | Labels and warnings for misleading information | Twitter blog |
| June 2020 | Added twitter voice | Twitter blog |