Los Angeles — No smartphone? No problem, so long as you are using Twitter on the go. Popular micro-blogging outfit Twitter has just announced an update for its mobile web version (mobile.Twitter.com) making it uniformly more consistent across various mobile phones and browsers.
The changes to Twitter brought about last December will now be available to those using feature phones, low-bandwidth networks, and older browsers as you do not want to make that financial commitment and jump on-board the smartphone bandwagon, then this update is pretty good for you.
The announcement was made by Satya Patel, Twitter vice president of product, over the Twitter blog. Patel explained some of the meaningful changes coming to feature phone tweeters:
Essentially, this updated version of mobile.Twitter.com empowers you to view the entire slew of tweets from the accounts that you follow in the Home tab, in addition to checking your @mentions in the Connect tab. Besides, the Discover tab enables you to see what is trending at the moment, and you can access direct messages and tweets in the Me tab.
Especially, people living in developing countries and still use feature phones would probably find this new version of Twitter for mobile web handy.
Patel also stated that, similar to the iPhone and Android Twitter websites, the new mobile Twitter is buzzing with speed than its previous iteration. Also, the site will use one-third less bandwidth than before. All of these changes to Twitter’s mobile web site will begin rolling out today.
Below is a screenshot from Twitter’s blog post of the new Twitter mobile on a Nokia phone.
It contains the same four icon/button menu–Home, @mentions, Connect (#) and Profile–that you are already familiar with, and Twitter claims that its new mobile version is ‘fast, like a native mobile app; it uses one-third less bandwidth than the previous iteration’.
As a matter of fact, it makes sense then as Twitter is consistently supporting feature phones and simple, low-signal devices. More so, smartphones have not yet prevailed the industry completely: feature phones are still a large portion of the cell phone market.
Of course, still some parts of the world where Twitter can be most effective communication tool are the same parts where feature phone use is most widespread. Moreover, the move sounds good for Twitter’s business development–the company has recently enabled advertisers to target mobile users with Promoted Tweets.