Twitter Bookmarks Provide Net Gain for Privacy, Usefulness

LOS ANGELES—Twitter on Thursday launched Bookmarks. This is potentially a good move for people’s privacy but also to help expand Twitter’s usefulness. Bookmarking allows people to save tweets in a private way, without having to favorite them. This is a feature users have been requesting for years. Though favoriting, hearting, or liking, has been the primary way to save tweets since the dawn of Twitter, when it comes to more sensitive tweets, like porn, not everyone wants to favorite the tweet because that favorite is public…and not everyone wants to lay out their porn interests to the world. Most people do not peruse the favorites list of the everyday Twitter user. However, as we have seen in the news, people like Ted Cruz or Harry Styles have had their Twitter hearts drug out in front of the world. Of course, any public figure that has a pornographic Twitter “like” dragged out in front of the world for judgment always claims that it was an accidental like or they were hacked, but we all know better. That being said, people should be able to save favorite porn tweets for later without being subject to judgment. Plus, liking a tweet is not always a good way to save a tweet. Sometimes you just want to let the person know that you like their tweet; or, what if you don’t like the tweet, but you want to come back to it later because you don’t like it? Trying to find the tweet that you were saving to read later amongst the sea of tweets that you hearted because thought were cool can be an organization nightmare if you are like me and heart a lot of tweets. From the user perspective, this is a great addition to Twitter functionality. From a business perspective, the new bookmark feature has the potential to increase traffic from Twitter to adult sites because people are able to save tweets privately. The only down side is that if your tweet is bookmarked, you have no way of knowing. For sticklers on user behavior and analytics, this will drive you nuts. Another potential consequence is that likes on Twitter may start to decrease because people are no longer using that feature as a way to save tweets. What will be interesting to see is if clicks increase because they are able to save them more easily, privately, and more effectively.