Twitter’s first vision
for the Apple Watch era
Originally published on 15 September 2014
Dan Frommer, writing for Quartz:
Apple briefly featured Twitter in its presentation, showing four features: the ability to receive a Twitter notification, favorite or retweet a tweet directly from that notification, view your timeline and trending tweets, and compose a new tweet.
Enabling social media capabilities onto a watch-based design isn’t just about creating applications that will work on it. Any software developer could probably whip up something for such a purpose in virtually no time.
The question should be more “how well is it going to work?”
These seem like straightforward, if obvious features for Twitter’s first Apple Watch app. But are they really that compelling? The key for Twitter — and, really, for all Apple Watch apps — is to pass this test: Why shouldn’t I just do this on my phone?
Indeed. The practice of reaching for the mobile device and doing the same can be (and feel) less tedious. Same goes for smartphones versus laptops — where the latter would be appropriate for those more-complex tasks.
Convenience and practicality don’t always go hand-in-hand, especially when the overall user experience — of utilising the social media related application — is hindered.
The Apple Watch also makes a solid case for a more algorithmically curated, condensed Twitter timeline — which fits in line with some of Twitter’s recent experiments. One thing we noticed is the text in Twitter’s app that describes your Timeline: “New and interesting.”
Does this mean something different than the entire, raw Twitter timeline? If we’re sitting in a meeting or on a bus, we probably don’t need to read all of Twitter. But — just hypothesizing, now — the best 10% of tweets in our timeline could make a great on-wrist snack here or there.
Here, the creation of a renewed user experience is most certainly on the cards — and a must if we are to take such interactive ultra-portable devices, like the smart watch, seriously and (possibly) make it a mass-adoption product category.
Kinny tweets aviation, social media and technology on Twitter.
