The pace of sweeping changes across Twitter has slowed down over the past months, but every now and then, changes at the social media company make the headlines. And now, it has once again shut down a feature in early days, that it began testing just last year – CoTweets.
On its support page for CoTweets, the social media company announced that it has pulled the plug on CoTweets, marking the end of an experiment that was introduced prior to the multi-billion-dollar acquisition of the popular micro-blogging site. The collaborative posting feature, which it had started testing last July, was shut down on Tuesday, January 31.
“We appreciate the feedback we’ve been given about CoTweets and we’re still looking for ways to implement this feature moving forward. We thank you for trying CoTweets and we’ve enjoyed watching all of your creativity with this feature come to life!” Twitter said on the support page for CoTweets.
While the feature has been removed, co-tweets will remain as they are for a month. Once the period is over, they will be automatically converted to retweets on the co-author’s profile. This does not, however, necessarily mean the final end of CoTweets, and Twitter left room for speculation by saying that it was “looking for ways to implement this feature” in the future. So CoTweets might take a page out of Twitter Blue’s book and make its return to the social media platform in a different form.
Unless you have been living under a rock since July 2022, then you have heard of – or even seen – the CoTweets feature. A CoTweet allows the users of two accounts to co-author posts that will appear both on their profiles and the timelines of their followers. Twitter started experimenting with the feature in a handful of countries last spring – the US, Korea, and Canada – and proved to be useful for brands that are engaged in collaborations or while making announcements. It would have been neat to get the hands on the feature when Twitter would roll the feature out globally, but it seems that it is not to be.
In a tweet, CEO Musk said that the shutting down of the CoTweets feature comes as the social media company was focussing on enabling writers to “add essays as attachments to tweets.” Next week, it will be launching a beta version of its new Superfollows program, which will supposedly help creators publish directly on the platform and earn from it. The tweet was unable to be viewed since Musk limited who can view his tweets, and all his tweets are protected behind a “locked” symbol.
