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Would You Ever Want a Twitter Phone?

Last week Facebook unveiled Facebook Home, their “app family” Android takeover that turns your device into a full-fledged Facebook-first hub. It takes over the homescreen, turning it into ...
Would You Ever Want a Twitter Phone?
Written by Josh Wolford
  • Last week Facebook unveiled Facebook Home, their “app family” Android takeover that turns your device into a full-fledged Facebook-first hub. It takes over the homescreen, turning it into a stream for Facebook news feed content and works Facebook messaging and notifications directly into the Android UI. Although they may be hesitant to say that they’ve created a “Facebook Phone,” what they have done is given plenty of Android users the ability to turn their phones into Facebook Phones.

    Is Twitter thinking about doing the same?

    Speaking at All Things D’s Dive Into Mobile, Twitter VP of Product Michael Sippey left the door open for such a product.

    “There are a lot of things we’re looking at on Android,” he said. “I think [Facebook Home] is an interesting product. I’d like to see tweets there. So we’ll see.”

    So, what would a “Twitter Home” product look like? And would you want it?

    Well, we can imagine an Android launcher that displays your tweet stream on the homepage in the same way that Facebook displays the news feed. Although Twitter can also be media-rich, the fact that Twitter users typically follow hundreds and even thousands of users, all of which appear in the stream unfiltered (unlike Facebook) makes it seem like there would need to be some tweaking to make sure the user isn’t flooded with too much content. It would be pretty easy to integrate Twitter notifications and messaging into the base Android experience, though.

    Of course, there’s no telling what a Twitter-based Android OS-lite interface would look like. And Twitter hasn’t said that they are working on or even seriously thinking about something like this. But Sippey makes it clear that Twitter is curious about users being able to turn their devices into “Twitter Phones.”

    What do you think? Sound like something you might want to play around with?

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