3 min read Update

Twitter Drops New Features: Live Photo Support, JPEG Quality Preservation, and More

Twitter Drops New Features: Live Photo Support, JPEG Quality Preservation, and More

Twitter rolled out a couple of features today. First, was the announcement that Twitter on Web will now preserve the JPEG quality. We all know how bad Twitter compression of photos is and thankfully we won’t have to deal with it, at least on the web. Remember that this feature is only available on Twitter for web which means if you are using official or third-party apps, your photos will still be compressed.

The second feature that Twitter announced was the support for Live Photos. After the launch of Live Photos feature in 2015 alongside the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus both Apple and the world seemed to forgot about this feature. It’s only with iOS 13, Apple gave users the ability to share Live Photos as 3-seconds long video clips. And now, Twitter has announced that users can upload Live Photos to the platform as GIFs.

Whenever you upload a Live Photo on Twitter, you will see a GIF button at the bottom left of the photo. By default, it’s turned off and you can tap on it to convert your Live Photo in a GIF and then upload it to Twitter. If you don’t do anything, your photo will upload as a still image. It’s great to see that companies including Apple are taking Live Photo a bit more seriously now. Apple even introduced several Live Photo editing tools in the Photos app. I hope that this trend continues and more and more social media platforms start supporting Live Photos.

Rounding up the day, Jack Dorsey (@jack), took to Twitter to announce to drop a bombshell news in a series of tweets,

Twitter is funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard.

twitter was so open early on that many saw its potential to be a decentralized internet standard, like SMTP (email protocol). For a variety of reasons, all reasonable at the time, we took a different path and increasingly centralized Twitter. But a lot’s changed over the years…

First, we’re facing entirely new challenges centralized solutions are struggling to meet. For instance, centralized enforcement of global policy to address abuse and misleading information is unlikely to scale over the long-term without placing far too much burden on people.

This is a big move by Twitter and while I am not sure that this will pan out, it is good to imagine a world where Twitter is decentralized. There’s already a decentralized Twitter-like service called Mastodon that exists. So, we know that it can be done. But, Jack Dorsey’s tweets show that the process is still in the ideation phase, and I am not sure how long will it take or will the project reach its fruitful conclusion. You can read his tweets below and let us know what you make of it. Let us know in the comments below.