There are tons of apps to access Twitter on the iPhone and iPad, but the social networking service is working to improve its official iOS offering with a big new update that just hit the iTunes App Store.
Twitter is promising improvements with the app’s ability to find people and tweets about different topics with the update to version 4.2. It has added a lot of features to help make finding new people to follow easier even when you’re away from Twitter’s primary portal on a web browser, including a new “Discover” tab that shows you who your friends follow to give you suggestions to expand your network.
The Discover tab also has a lot more information than just a list of people followed by your friends. You’ll see retweets made by the people you follow of the people they follow, so you’ll not only get a snapshot of Twitter personalities that people in your network think are interesting, you’ll be able to see exactly what they thought was interesting. The tab also has its own search feature to make finding things within it easier.
Searching in the Discover tab has its own improvements, as well. Names you enter will auto-complete and you’ll be taken straight to the Twitter feed of the person you’re looking to find, for example. The app will also give you spelling suggestions when you search, and saves your recent searches so you can find the results quickly more than once.
Notifications have also been tweaked in the new version of the app. When something you send to Twitter is retweeted, for example, the app will now send a push notification, as it will for when someone sets a tweet of yours as their “favorite.” If you pick up new followers, you’ll also receive a notification.
The improvements to Twitter should make it work a lot better in many respects, which is definitely a good thing as “social” becomes more mobile. It still seems as though Twitter’s mobile app isn’t quite as robust as its web offering, but it’s definitely coming along.
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