Twitter gets much needed ‘hover’ feature

I have always wondered what makes Twitter successful? They do not monetize their website and keep growing exponentially. They have no clear cut monetization plan out there either. That debate is probably worthy of another post sometime in the future but the fact is somewhere down the line Twitter; if it has to make money will have to keep the regular Twitter users on their website. Which means Twitter faces the task of getting people back from Twitter based applications to their website.

First we have seen the List feature and ReTweet feature. Now soon we all will see the Hovercard feature. This actually allows you to point the point over a ‘twitter id’ and you get a pop-up with info about the user. Take a look in the image below for better understanding of the this new feature.

hover_twitter

  • Now when you see a @username on Twitter; especially in terms of reTweet, you can keep the mouse over twitter id and a pop-up shows up the brief intro of the user.
  • You can choose to follow or retweet from the pop-up itself.
  • The Settings circle means you can probably even add the use to a specific list you have created. That sounds pretty handy.
  • I have not seen such a feature with any of the Twitter apps except maybe in HootSuite. So it would be a interesting development from Twitter.

I have not yet been able to use this feature with Twitter as my account has not been the lucky ones to have this feature available. Yes, you have guessed it right, they are going about it the reTweet way. Twitter will release the ‘Hover card‘ function over time to all users. So unless you are not one of the lucky ones, have patience and wait for your turn. 🙂

Link: Twitter Blog