Twitter has just announced some search and discovery updates to their iOS and Android apps as well as mobile.twitter.com that they say will help users “better find what’s most important to you when you’re on the go.”
What they’ve done is tweaked their discovery and search functions to provide a single steam of information – tweets, users, activity, trends. According to Twitter, it will all be in one place now.
The Discover tab now aggregates all kinds of activity into one stream on both iOS and Android. Twitter has also added the ability to access activity and trends from the top of the Discover tab.
Search has been updated in a similar fashion:
“Search results now surface the most relevant mix of Tweets, photos, and accounts, all in one stream (similar to the stream in Discover). We’ve also added a new search button to Twitter for iPhone, letting you search from anywhere within the app. (This button was already available in the Android and iPad apps.) Look for the magnifying glass icon next to the button you use to compose a Tweet,” says Twitter.
Twitter has also updated the @connect tab, which now defaults to showing all types of interactions. You can go into your settings and set the default to simply show @mentions if that’s what you want.
Also, they changed the way the apps manage links to outside sites. If you click on a URL inside a tweet, you now go directly to the site no matter where you are in the Twitter app. Before, you would have to tap the tweet as a whole, go to and expanded view, and then click on the outside link to be directed out.
Twitter says that the updates should be available in both the App Store and Google Play, but as of the writing of this article neither seem to be available yet. We’ll let you know when they drop.