Have you used Twitter’s brand new CoTweets feature? If not, it looks like you’ve already missed your chance. And, if you did, say goodbye…today.
Twitter is immediately shutting down CoTweets, an experimental feature that allowed two Twitter users to create and post a tweet in tandem. In the blink of an eye or you’ll miss it announcement(Opens in a new window) hidden away on Twitter’s About CoTweets help page, the company announced that it would be “removing” the feature starting Tuesday, January 31.
Twitter hid the CoTweets shutdown announcement.
Starting today, users will no longer be able to create CoTweets. According to Twitter, CoTweets will continue to be visible for another month. After which, the CoTweet messages will then be converted into regular tweets. The Twitter user who initiated the CoTweet will be considered the sole author of the tweet. The CoTweet’s secondary author, or user who was invited to co-create the CoTweet, will be removed from the tweet. The tweet they co-wrote will then be visible on their page as a retweet from the author of the original tweet.
Twitter first launched CoTweets in July 2022, just months before Elon Musk acquired the company. The company promoted the feature as a way for two Twitter users to make announcements together or help spotlight another user. These tweets would appear in users’ feeds as posted by the two authors of the CoTweet. In order to create a tweet, a user would first write the tweet, then send an invitation to another user to appear as a CoTweets co-author before posting the tweet.
An example of how CoTweets looks. Some users got a little creative.
This is far from the first time Twitter has shut down “experimental” features. Most notable, the Twitter version of Instagram Stories, called Fleets, was spear in November 2020. The company to close(Opens in a new window) the feature less than a year later in August 2021.
However, under Elon Musk, Twitter laid off thousands of employees and in turn began shutting down products and services that were well beyond the testing phase. Earlier this month, for example, Twitter’s newsletter platform, Revue, was shut down. The company acquired(Opens in a new window) Revue in January 2021 and soon integrated features that allowed Twitter users to seamlessly subscribe to Revue newsletters directly on Twitter with a single click.
As Musk’s Twitter moves to transform(Opens in a new window) in a payment service, it seems any Twitter feature that isn’t essential to the platform could be next on the chopping block. Hopefully, in the future, users will get a bit more of a warning than a shutdown announcement added to a seldom-visited internal help page like Twitter did with CoTweets.
