Twitter: Microblogging platform Twitter has now confirmed that it is exploring an Instagram-like feature to let two accounts co-author a tweet. The evidence of the development of this feature has been posted by app researcher Alessandro Paluzzi since the end of last year, but now, Paluzzi has found a seemingly official dialogue box from Twitter showing how the collaborations on tweets could work on the platform.

Last year, competitor Meta-owned platform Instagram had already launched the feature allowing two users to collaborate on a post, be it for joint credit, brand partnership or influencer campaigns. Since then, this option is being increasingly used by creators on the photo-sharing platform. Now, it seems that Twitter has decided to borrow a leaf from Instagram’s book.

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Paluzzi has been creating a thread since December 2021 about the development of this feature on Twitter. According to the screenshots posted by the app researcher, users would have a collaborator icon added in the many options available in the tweet creator, where the user would be able to key in the username of the collaborator. While the feature is under development, from the latest information shared by Paluzzi, which looks like an official information box by Twitter, it seems that users would only be able to invite accounts that are public and follow them back to become collaborators. The other account would need to accept a collaboration request for the tweet to be co-owned.

A co-authored tweet would feature the account names as well as handles of both the collaborators, and both of their avatars would also show up on the left side, in place of the usually single avatar.

However, it is not currently known if there would be any proper mechanism in place to prevent popular accounts from being spammed by collaborator requests. For example, Twitter established its place as a platform for celebrities, and still continues to be a popular platform for fans to interact with or discuss about their favourite artistes. In fact, many celebrities also follow some of the popular fan pages. In light of this, there is a chance that a celebrity might be spammed by numerous collaboration tweet requests from the accounts that do follow.

There are also many popular influencers who do not officially fall in the category of celebrities but have a vast following. These influencers also follow many of their followers, and again risk being spammed by such requests.

However, since the feature is still in the works, there seems like many different layers of the feature are yet to be uncovered, including whether this would work on all versions (web, desktop app and mobile app) or only on select ones. That said, it’s a feature that many users would surely be looking forward to.