Have you used Twitter’s fairly new CoTweets feature? If not, it looks like you’ve already missed your chance. And if so, say goodbye…today.
Twitter will soon shut down CoTweets, an experimental feature that allows two Twitter users to collaborate and create and publish tweets.With a pop-up that you’ll miss if you don’t blink Presentation(opens in new window) Tucked away in Twitter’s CoTweets help page, the company has announced that the feature will be “deprecated” starting Tuesday, January 31st.
Twitter hid the announcement of the closure of CoTweets.
Credit: Mashable screenshot
Starting today, users will no longer be able to create CoTweets. Twitter says CoTweets will continue to appear for another month. CoTweet posts are then converted to regular Tweets. His Twitter user who started CoTweet is considered the sole author of the Tweet. Users invited as CoTweet secondary authors or CoTweet co-authors will be removed from the Tweet. Co-authored Tweets appear on the page as Retweets of the original Tweet author.
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Twitter first launched CoTweets in July 2022, months before Elon Musk acquired the company. The company promoted the feature as a way for two of her Twitter users to announce together or spotlight another. These tweets will appear in the user’s feed as if they were posted by both CoTweet authors. To create a Tweet, first she has to create a Tweet by one user and before posting the Tweet she needs to send an invitation to another user to appear as a co-author of CoTweets .
An example of what CoTweets might look like. Some users got a little creative.
Credit: Mashable screenshot
This isn’t the first time Twitter has shut down an “experimental” feature. Most notably was his version of his Instagram story on Twitter called Fleet. launch November 2020. shut down(opens in new window) This feature will roll out in less than a year in August 2021.
But under Elon Musk, Twitter began laying off thousands of employees and shutting down products and services far beyond the testing stage. For example, earlier this month, Twitter’s newsletter platform Revue shut down.company got(opens in new window) Revue will be released in January 2021, and an out-of-the-box integrated feature will allow Twitter users to seamlessly subscribe to the Revue newsletter directly on Twitter with just a click.
Musk’s Twitter Transform(opens in new window) Given the move to payment services, Twitter features that aren’t core to the platform seem likely to emerge in the next phase. Hopefully, in the future, Twitter will be able to give users a little more attention than adding a closure notice to a rarely-visited internal help page, as they did with CoTweets.
