Published July 18, 2023

Twitter 2.0 looks set to continue its trend of re-animating previously in-development Twitter features, and framing them as new opportunities, with its recently retired long-form content option ‘Notes’ set to take flight once again, under a new name.

As you can see in this example, shared by journalist Fausto Chou, the current Notes section has been renamed ‘Articles’ in the app, as Twitter looks to reinvent the long-form content option, as a means to facilitate a broader range of content posting opportunities in the app.

Which is actually the name that Twitter originally had for Notes, when it was in early development.

That was back in February last year, ahead of the eventual launch of Notes in June, which was then shelved a few months later, as part of the Musk takeover of the app.

The Twitter 2.0 team has thus far seemed more focused on facilitating long-form posting in the main feed, with Twitter Blue subscribers now able to post 25k character tweets, including inline images, essentially replicating the Notes model as long-form tweets.

That seems less intuitive than a separate long-form section, like Notes, and maybe, with the renaming of Notes to Articles, this is a tacit admission that Twitter users would prefer a separate long-form experience, as opposed to the expanding, super long tweets.

Or maybe it’ll be another supplementary element, an expanded canvas for longer content.

Twitter CTO Elon Musk has confirmed that Articles is coming, and that it will seemingly have no length limit.

Will that see people post more super-long content to the app?

It’s still too early to say whether Musk and Co. will be able to reform usage habits, and make Twitter into a more universally valuable app, for a range of applications. But it’s certainly trying, with new elements like job listings, long-form video, in-stream payments, and even dating profiles in varying stages of development.

Elon’s vision is that Twitter could eventually become the only app that you’ll need, facilitating a wide range of different functionality, and for that to happen, it needs to add in more options, as a starting point to get the ball rolling on each front.

Whether long-form content fits in the app is one question, but that suitability is likely also relative to monetization, and whether Twitter can provide equitable revenue share, in order to motivate creators to share exclusive content in the app.

Maybe, if Twitter can cross that barrier, and become the host of more exclusives, that could be a pathway to building its audience and value.

Articles will seemingly be another element in this broader push.