Twitter Experiments With News By Direct Message With Event Parrot Account

Twitter has been running a lot of experiments lately, and the latest one deals with helping users keep up with what’s happening in the world. It’s being conducted using an account @eventpa...
Twitter Experiments With News By Direct Message With Event Parrot Account
Written by Chris Crum

Twitter has been running a lot of experiments lately, and the latest one deals with helping users keep up with what’s happening in the world. It’s being conducted using an account @eventparrot, which has already accumulated nearly 10,000 followers despite not having tweeted yet.

It may not be tweeting much anyway, however, as in the bio it says followers will receive direct messages that help them keep up.

Event Parrot

Twitter discussed its experimentation process a little bit in a blog post last month.

“We also experiment with features that may never be released to everyone who uses Twitter,” wrote Twitter VP, Engineering, Alex Roetter. “Those experiments are perhaps even more valuable because they help us decide what not to do –– which is important as we work to keep Twitter simple while improving the user experience. Ultimately, our goal is to learn and keep making the product better; we aren’t necessarily looking to launch all of the experiments we roll out.”

“In recent months, that trend has picked up –– so much so that it’s rare for a day to go by when we’re not releasing at least one experiment,” he said. “We’re able to run tests more frequently because we’ve built a more robust experimentation framework, which we use to run tests not only on the web, but also in our mobile apps: Twitter for iPhone and Twitter for Android. With the majority of our users accessing Twitter from a mobile device, it’s important for us to be able to test on mobile. Over time, you’ll continue to see us test and introduce new features first on mobile. For example, we recently introduced the people button which suggests accounts for you to follow.”

One of the ways some of Twitter’s experiments have been surfacing has been through these experimental accounts like Event Parrot.

It used the account @MagicRegs, for example, before rolling out its new personalized recommendations. I wouldn’t be surprised to see more of these accounts popping up in the near future. Twitter must have quite a bit of experimenting to do with the IPO on the way.

[via TechCrunch]

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