Twitter is striking back against Snapchat’s rising popularity by introducing stickers to its service. From today, everyone should have the ability to add “emojis, accessories and props” to any image they choose to tweet.
Announced last month, in a blog post, Twitter's wasted no time in rolling them out to all its users around the world. In our testing, it hasn't quite reached the WIRED UK office's Android users, although it is available on iOS devices in our testing.
Twitter, founded in 2006, allows users to broadcast short messages, photos and video clips, and gained popularity after support from fans like Steven Fry. The company's acquisition of Periscope gave it the ability for live streaming back in March 2015. The app was once the largest social network after Facebook, but has now been overtaken by Facebook’s subsidiary apps Whatsapp, Messenger and Instagram.
The introduction of Stickers also comes shortly after Bloomberg announced earlier this month that Snapchat has overtaken Twitter in popularity.
The analysts found Snapchat had 150 million daily users compared to Twitter’s 140 million. This is a recent change, as stats in December showed Snapchat behind Twitter in terms of daily users.
Much like the sticker feature in Snapchat, the update gives you the ability to add multiple stickers to a photo, as well as letting you resize and rotate them. To add a sticker to a picture, you just need to tap the smiley symbol that comes up next to the edit options when adding a photo to a tweet.
A new feature additionally allows the stickers to act like hashtags, making photos searchable. Like a hashtag, clicking on a sticker will automatically take you to a stream showing others that have used the same image.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
