Twitter wants you to watch more videos. To help give user-generated clips and professional live-streams maximum exposure, the platform is surfacing video in more places.
First up, Twitter is making sure you see more live video courtesy of Periscope in relation to breaking news and events. Now, when you access its trending feed within its recently launched Explore tab, you may see a “live” icon next to certain results. Tap on the trend in question, and Twitter will show you live-streams alongside regular tweets.
Watch what's trending – LIVE! You'll now see Periscopes surfaced in top trends. pic.twitter.com/Bhj8JT2ITw
— Creators (@XCreators) February 14, 2017
Seeing as Periscope’s users often post live broadcasts of breaking events around the world, the clips make ideal visual accompaniments for trending news stories on Twitter. The likes of PBS and digital media company Cheddar are also increasingly using the app to air live coverage from the Senate floor, White House press briefings, and news conferences.
The change may be the handiwork of Periscope CEO Kayvon Beykpour, who was promoted to Twitter’s executive team last year, and is now reportedly handling product and engineering for live video on the platform.
As Twitter moves to further integrate Periscope with its flagship service (having already added the ability to go live from within its main app), who better to handle the video experience on the service than the Periscope co-founder? Let’s not forget that Periscope itself does a great job of curating breaking news and events streams into channels that users can tune into. Twitter also recently added 360 live video to Periscope, so be prepared to see more of those types of streams, too.
Another change that has been spotted on the Twitter app is a new “top videos for you” section. What seems to be an experiment, the new section displays relevant videos within the timeline in the vein of the platform’s “while you were away” feature for tweets, according to Mashable. The videos the test surfaces aren’t just limited to clips from accounts you follow, but can also include content Twitter thinks you may enjoy based on your activity.
With the platform witnessing an 11 percent increase in daily engagement during its fourth quarter, according to its own estimates, it’s no wonder Twitter is trying to show its highly active users more video. After all, the company has ramped up visual content through a number of multimillion-dollar deals with media broadcasters and sports leagues, including Bloomberg, the NFL, and NBA, among others.
Twitter recently revealed that it attracted 31 million unique viewers, who tuned in to more than 600 hours of live video across around 400 general events between September and December. Those numbers should encourage it to strike even more video partnerships, allowing it to add more visual content across its platform.
Discord is trying to push more visibility on the internet for some of its biggest communities, and there's a good chance your messages could end up in a Google Search. The platform is preparing to make conversations from certain public servers searchable on the web, so there's a privacy setting you might want to check before the rollout begins.
According to Discord's official announcement, the changes will roll out in two stages. Starting November 16, qualifying servers will have public web pages featuring automated summaries of conversations. By mid-December, individual messages from eligible public channels could also appear word-for-word in Google and other search engines.
You just opened X and started typing your thoughts. Imagine the jump scare when a hand suddenly pops up on your screen, pointing at the promote button. It doesn’t say a word and simply points. For a growing number of X users, this isn’t a made-up scenario but something they have been seeing since yesterday, and very few of them are amused.
Most of us have learned to tune out the usual in-app upsells, whether it’s a glowing upgrade banner or a pop-up about a premium plan. A floating hand hovering over your draft is much harder to ignore, and that’s probably the whole point.
Scroll through any app for five minutes, and you’ll find someone maxxing something. Their skin, their sleep, their protein intake, even their Friday night on the couch. That little suffix has been everywhere this year, and now it has a trophy to show for it. In a recent announcement, Dictionary.com named maxxing its 2026 Word of the Year.
What are people actually doing when they’re maxxing?