Apps •

Twitter Is Introducing A New GIF Button On Its Mobile App

February 5, 2016 By Chen Lai Leave a Comment

‘Bring on the GIF button, Twitter!’ – say the fans.

Pssst! Rumor has it, Twitter is introducing a new GIF button on its mobile app. The company wants its users to share more GIFs and the microblogging platform is testing a dedicated GIF button on mobile.

As you may very well know, Twitter is one of the most popular social networking services online. According to the most recent research, the company has more than 320 monthly users.

Did you know that Twitter is more addictive than cigarettes and alcohol? Or that a day’s worth of Twitter posts would fill a 10-million-page book? Or that Twitter’s bird has a name and it’s actually called Larry? These are just a few curious facts.

The actual news is that Twitter has begun testing a new feature for fans of reaction GIFs. Some users have spotted a dedicated GIF button in their Android apps, positioned right in the middle of the camera and poll icons.

Bank of the Ozarks Director of Marketing, Phil Pearlman, was able to test it out for TechCrunch and discovered that the new button is a portal to a selection of trending GIFs, including some categorized by mood and others that were trending.

As you can see in the tweet below, the dedicated GIF feature can be found in the ‘compose tweet’ screen, sitting in between the camera and poll icons.

If people aren't seeing it yet twttr is testing way cool gif feature. cc @bluechoochoo pic.twitter.com/LuTsVeUiSs

— Phil Pearlman (@ppearlman) February 4, 2016

A lot of people, including Pearlman, only had access to the button for a short while, though – it disappeared from their apps as quickly as it came.

Twitter hasn’t issued any official statement on the tests, but responded to a request for comment from TechCrunch‘s Jon Russell with the following GIF:

GIFs are gaining quite a lot of popularity in social media. In June 2014, Twitter announced that users can share and view animated GIFs online as well as on mobile. Some other social networking services such as Tumblr and Pinterest also support GIFs. GIFs have more of a fun and entertainment value.

However, GIFs also potentially holds commercial value for companies to promote their brands and products. For example, instant messenger app Kik, which has more than 275 million registered users across the world, has announced the launch of branded GIFs on its platform. Branded GIFs will allow companies to promote their brands on the chat app for a charge.

Of course, it remains to be seen if Twitter is adding the dedicated GIF button only for fun or also to increase revenue.

Image Sources: softpedia-static.com; vox-cdn.com.

Twitter Will Spy Users’ Smartphones Through “App Graph”

November 27, 2014 By Rebecca McGhee Leave a Comment

Twitter plans to peek into the smartphones of its users.

Recently, Twitter released a new update which will permit its social network to keep an eye on the apps users download on their phones. The company launched the new app update for iOS users on Wednesday. However, twitter intends to launch the new update app for Android users as well.

The worst part is that through this latest update the company can gather all your personal data from your phones.

On the other hand, Twitter stated that the major goal behind this update is to inform Twitter engineers about the kind of content users are interested in. It will make easier for company design new apps and Twitter updates in the future. Twitter named this new feature as “app graph”.

Moreover, the new feature will let users personalize the content which emerge on their timeline from other accounts. Earlier, the social network announced that soon users of Twitter will view tweets on their timeline from other accounts as well. The firm used an algorithm for this particular purpose. The algorithm determine the interest of users through their older tweets.

Business of twitter is entirely rely on advertisement which requires a large amount of users’ data. Unfortunately, the social networking service provider hold relatively less information as compared to the other social networking sites such as Facebook. Therefore, this step will offer a big help to Twitter for the improvement of content recommendations.

Apple’s iOS 8: Uniting Devices & Apps

September 23, 2014 By Rebecca McGhee Leave a Comment

Have you tried Apple’s iOS 8 software so far? Certainly, the achievement Apple’s new software features could be referred to just one sound ‘Unity’.

However, most of the iPhone users also have iPads and Mac laptops and in the meanwhile, other family members do have Apple devices. The new Apple’s iOS 8 software for iPhone and iPads helps all devices to act like one. On the other hand, the apps on these devices set up to unite also.

iOS8 Keyboard Apps Made Typing Speed Blazingly Fast

September 20, 2014 By Jason Leathers Leave a Comment

Today, a number of third-party keyboards have been released for iPhone users take advantage of for the first time and make typing a breeze in iOS8.

Several of the great features are present in iOS 8, one of the greatest latest features are custom keyboards because Apple has at last permitted third-party developers to more access to their apps and make keyboard apps for iOS. It’s true that Apple’s have its personal keyboard app is much better now with features like word recommendations and prediction, but third-party apps suggest improved prediction, extra languages and different themes.

You can now restore the default iOS keyboard with that of your own choosing keyboard app, including apps from well-liked keyboard makers like SwiftKey and Swype, furthermore, these apps can send out or obtain your data.

All the keyboard apps are now the most downloading apps in Charts, presently Swype, SwiftKey and Fleksy have all released keyboards for iOS 8, and we took them all for (more preferred) spins.

Fleksy

Fleksy delights itself on being one of the best ever keyboards around, the quick typing app to iOS 8 with support for over 40 languages, a range of bright themes and available in two keyboard sizes. Fleksy has also been renowned as one of the few keyboards those will assist you to create your own writing style and offers the capability to learn by connecting to your email and social networks.

Swype

One of the major popular keyboards is Swype, this app is also very proud of its next-word prediction technology and Swype brings its smooth gesture-based interface to iOS 8, but it supports only few languages such as English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish language support, along with 5 different themes, will be presented at the launch.

SwiftKey

This is the third best keyboard app SwiftKey renowned in user for its smart auto-correct and as well as SwiftKey Flow, which suggests a gesture-based typing experience same as in Swype and this app support for Canadian English and Canadian French, as well as 13 other languages. This amazing app SwiftKey will also propose the capability to learn your language use from email and social networks to recover its prediction algorithms.

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