Twitter announced that it acquired OpenBack, a company focused on managing notifications in mobile devices, which is based in Dublin, Ireland.
“Today, I'm excited to share that Twitter has acquired @OpenBackHQ, a mobile platform that helps make applications more attractive through on-device push notification control,” Jay Sullivan, head of Consumer Products at the company, said in a Twitter thread.
The manager highlighted that the optimization of push notifications helps to lead users to “conversations that interest them on Twitter”. He contrasted this with the distraction generated by irrelevant notifications. Thus, this service would help people have a more relevant and personalized experience.
“With millions of people visiting Twitter through notifications every day, we want them to be timely, relevant and engaging,” Sullivan said. He concluded, “OpenBack and its talented team joining Twitter will help us improve our ability to deliver the right notifications at the right time, in a way that prioritizes people's privacy.”
By entering the official website of the Dublin-based company you can also read information about this new acquisition. The text clarifies that the company will close on April 19 of this year.
“We are pleased to announce that OpenBack is joining Twitter! We are very grateful to all our customers and supporters along the way, as we have worked to make push notifications truly come first for users. With Twitter's positive impact on the world, we are very excited to be part of the Twitter team and continue to build the future of notifications there. OpenBack will close on April 19, 202″, the statement says.
It is not yet clear how the notification change will be implemented on the platform, but considering the core of this company's business and Sullivan's words it can be inferred that it will allow the user to generate a sort of list with more relevant accounts. That way, the system could be configured to receive notifications every time one of those selected profiles writes a tweet.
It is a matter of solving in some way one of the dilemmas of these times: the constant bombardment of notifications from the dozens of apps that users have installed on their mobile phones.
Although operating systems have options to manage these warnings, by activating the “do not disturb” or “focus” mode, among other alternatives, the truth is that having a service that, within an app, allows us to establish a criterion of relevance for push notifications is something very interesting.
In this way, the user does not need to silence the phone completely, or end all Twitter notifications, because they will have a tool to prioritize alerts from that virtual space.
Another interesting tool that Twitter added in recent times to favor the most relevant and positive interactions, is the possibility of marking tweets as irrelevant, negative or annoying. This is an alternative known as “bajivotos”, which was introduced in February and is available, on a limited basis, to some users in Latin America, the United States and other regions of the world, both in iOS, Android as a desktop version.
To make use of this alternative, simply click on the down arrow icon that appears when asking for tweets, right between the heart and share icons. When you click on the arrow, it will turn red.
The objective is to limit comments that are not useful or offensive so that they lose strength. “We're always looking for new ways to increase healthy engagement and engagement on Twitter. We are still in the learning phase of this experiment and we seek to better understand how the Bajivotos could help us, in the future, to give greater visibility to the most relevant content for people on Twitter. At this stage, the Bajivotos are still private and have no impact on the order of the answers,” they explained to Infobae from the social network, at the time.
Test participants agreed that this feature helps to raise the quality of conversations on Twitter, which are known among users as the most “toxic” of all social networks.
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