Twitter can be a great place for keeping in touch with friends and interacting with followers in real time. Its interface, though, hasn’t been the ideal facilitator of such types of communication. In a recent blog post, however, Twitter announced upcoming real-time notifications on Twitter.com that should make it easier than ever to interact with others on the site.
Soon, users logged into Twitter on the Web will instantly receive pop-up notifications when someone replies, favorites, or retweets one of their tweets. They can also receive pop-up notifications when they receive direct messages or new follows. The new notifications will appear in the bottom-right corner of Twitter.com and will be rolled out over the coming weeks.
All of these notifications are interactive, so users can reply, favorite, and follow back directly within notifications. This means that soon, instead of having to disrupt your Twitter experience to visit your notifications tab, you’ll be able to reply to your during your usual Twitter flow. Since it will be easier to reply to tweets and other types of engagement, people might start using Twitter as more of a public chat service and potentially start tweeting more as a result.
If pop-up notifications don’t sound like your cup of tea, you can disable or limit them in your Twitter settings.
The release of pop-up notifications follows a huge profile redesign on Twitter that places greater emphasis on multimedia, especially images. Combined, the two updates could make Twitter stickier by first using visuals to draw in more users and then using notifications to encourage them to stay on the site longer.
Will you use Twitter’s new Web notifications?
