Twitter is testing new changes to how photos and videos appear on its apps, closer to how images appear on other services such as Instagram.
The new feature will expand visual media embedded in tweets to fill the whole width of a mobile phone’s screen.
Currently, images are indented next to a user’s profile photo and take up much less screen space.
Twitter said the new layout – being tested on iOS but not Android – would give media “more room to shine”.
Now testing on iOS:
Edge to edge Tweets that span the width of the timeline so your photos, GIFs, and videos can have more room to shine. pic.twitter.com/luAHoPjjlY
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) September 7, 2021
It is the latest in a series of tests to change the core Twitter experience:
it has been testing upvote and downvote buttons similar to those seen on Reddit
- launched a “tip jar” feature to allow users to pay each other for “good” tweets
- radically altered its image-cropping algorithms in recent months
- introduced “super follows” for subscriber-only content
- released – but then killed off – Fleets, an Instagram stories-like temporary tweets feature
The experimental changes to fuel content creation and consumption come amid a rollout of Twitter’s subscription service for dedicated users, Twitter Blue.
