Twitter is one of the most well-known social media platforms boasting 320 million users from March 2016. But the well-known app is now making some changes to their platform, such as: removing the egg avatar for new users, creating a ‘lite’ version and not counting tagged people’s names in the character count.

Online users are sad about the change to the egg profile image, as many users thought that it was cute or that it said something about them when twitter only used it so that people would see it as an incentive to change it to one that they chose themselves. Now that this is to be changed we feel that it sort of removes the theme of Twitter. This theme being that when you sign up to twitter you’re an egg, the home feed is a bird box and the tweet box is a feather and when you post something it’s called a ‘tweet’.  So now the ‘cute’ egg is to be replaced with a greyed out silhouette of someone so that it highlights that it’s to be temporary, generic and universal.  The egg is unfortunately associated with online trolling and bullying so with the new update will automatically mute these users until they change their avatar.

In addition to this Twitter have also released a Lite version of their app to reach more users in countries with slow cellular networks. The new service works on any phone through the browser and claims to load quickly and save on data consumption. In the new Lite version, there’s a feature that you can turn on in the settings which loads lightweight previews of images and helps you save up to 70% on data usage. Similarly, to the normal app, it still lets you upload and view media in tweets, but you won’t have features like photo editing and live streaming on the Lite version.

Also, Twitter’s other update is that now it isn’t counting a user’s name in a tweet. So, if you were replying to a tweet or mentioning your friend in something the name of that person won’t be accounted for in the character count. Which is great as if your friend has a long username it won’t be counted so you won’t have to make multiple tweets or commit a dreaded grammar mistake to fit everything into one tweet. 

These updates should be available soon to all Twitter users.