Twitter announced today that it’s launching “Notes,” a way to write and publish long-form content on the platform. The official announcement comes a day after TechCrunch reported that the feature would be launching soon. A small group of writers in the United States, Canada, Ghana and the United Kingdom have access to Notes as part of the initial testing phase.
Twitter says Notes can be read on and off Twitter by people in most countries. Users who are part of the testing phase will get access to a new “Write” tab, which is where they write and access all of their Notes. These users will also have a new “Notes” tab in their profile that holds their published work.
With the new feature, Users will be able to create articles using rich formatting and uploaded media, which can then be tweeted and shared with followers upon publishing. Like tweets, Notes will have their own link and can be tweeted, retweeted, sent in DM’s, liked and bookmarked.
Twitter Notes has the potential to change how some people use the social media platform to share their more in-depth thoughts and ideas. The new feature could be particularly useful for those users who infrequently publish article-length content and don’t want the hassle of setting up and maintaining their own blog or website. The feature also marks one of Twitter’s more significant changes since doubling the character count from 140 to 280 characters.
The new feature will address situations where it can be difficult to follow threads by allowing users to put all of the text into a Note. The feature will also address situation where users had to post screenshots of their Notes app in order to tweet a large portion of text. The new Notes feature should solve both of these issues.
The introduction of Twitter Notes may pose some competition with long-form blogging platforms, like WordPress or Medium, the latter coincidentally developed by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams.
Twitter also announced that it’s launching a new Twitter Write team that is focused on building tools for readers. The team will be focused on improving the Twitter experience for writer. The social media giant notes that its definition of writers includes journalists, bloggers, newsletter publishers, comedians, content creators, social media community managers, poets, screenwriters and more.