Twitter Inc. (NYSE: TWTR) presented on Monday #Stickers, a picture-editing tool for mobile users. It offers a catalog of emojis, accessories and props that can be put on photographs. Content using the new feature can be searched by tapping on a particular sticker.
#Stickers comes as a new form of the hashtag. For instance, people can find topics by clicking on a sunglasses sticker or a flag. Leslie Berland, Chief Marketing Officer at the company, said that millions of Tweets now include attached pictures.
“You can see how people all over the world use that sticker in different ways,” said Twitter’s Senior Product Manager Sasank Reddy.
The new #Stickers feature will be available for iOS and Android devices “over the next few weeks”, said the company led by Jack Dorsey. The new editing tool is only available for mobile users. However, people using Twitter on the web can search for hashtags using stickers.
Coming soon! Unleash your creativity by adding fun #Stickers to your photos on Twitter: https://t.co/Ph92Oivyhy pic.twitter.com/NZoM6nHenD
— Twitter (@twitter) June 27, 2016
The power of emojis: Snapchat, Apple, Whatsapp are behind this new modern ideograms
More than 310 million people are using the 140-character social network every month. Twitter was one of the last companies to join the emojis trend. Snapchat acquired in March Bitstrips, an organization dedicated to creating personalized avatars, for $100 million.
The Unicode Consortium, a non-profit organization in charge of approved a new batch of 72 emojis recently. Apple said on early June that the new pack of graphic shortcuts will be available for all devices using iOS 10.
Apple has not released the public version of iOS 10 yet. Redmond Pie blogger Paul Morris has found a way to use them on iOS 9 devices. Users need to enter here and copy all emojis from the official website. Then, they can paste them on a note or text editor, to use them whenever they want.
72 new emoji are to be introduced in iOS 10, along with the Unicode 9.0 update. ▶️ https://t.co/ykrw9618gd pic.twitter.com/3wrdKFwkju
— Tech Titan News (@TechTitanNews) June 23, 2016
The company led by Tim Cook said that emojis will now appear three times bigger on iOS devices. According to sources who spoke to Macerkopf, Whatsapp is following Apple’s steps and is already planning to add support to larger emojis.
“#Stickers give people a fun way to add their unique style to their photos. By making stickers searchable like hashtags, we’re enabling the best of Twitter: making it easy for people to create conversations around events and experiences that are happening right now,” said Berland in a statement.
Shares of the San Francisco-based company felt (3.99%) on Monday afternoon after it announced the new #Stickers feature. Twitter’s stock price has been declining over the last quarter of the year.
To celebrate the launch of #stickers on #twitter, I present the Twitter comms and policy team.. pic.twitter.com/rVte6eYiu4
— Helen Prowse (@hlp) June 27, 2016
Twitter would be planning to add support for longer tweets. The company would also introduce a new algorithm to change how content is displayed, based on relevance. On early June, the social network confirmed that millions of accounts had been compromised by hackers.
Twitter recently introduced support for longer videos. Previously, users were allowed to upload 30-second videos. Now they can upload video content containing up to 140 seconds. Social network users have been showing a significant interest towards audiovisual content, instead of written material, during the last three years.
you can add stickers onto pics on twitter now pic.twitter.com/rH0mB3cIRb
— ️ (@Iemonade) June 27, 2016
Source: Twitter Blog