Twitter has today announced the launch of Twitter Lite, a new mobile web experience which minimises data usage,for emerging markets including India. Starting today, Twitter Lite is available for the Indian market and one can access this by visitingmobile.twitter.comvia his/her smartphone or tablet.
According to Twitter, the new Lite version loads quickly on slower connections, is resilient on unreliable mobile networks and takes up less than 1MB on your device. “We also optimised it for speed, with up to 30% faster launch times as well as quicker navigation throughout Twitter. Twitter Lite provides the key features of Twitter—your timeline, Tweets, Direct Messages, trends, profiles, media uploads, notifications, and more. With Twitter Lite, we are making Twitter more accessible to millions of people—all you need is a smartphone or tablet with a browser,” the company said in a blog post.
This might be a case of too little, too late for the once trendy firm, now struggling with twin chalenges of growth and monetisation. With the millennial generation not really taking to the platform in a big way, and data costs heading south for a while now, it remains to be seen if this latest mobe will make a significant impact in India.
Twitter has also partnered with Vodafone to provide live cricket updates via a specially curated Twitter timeline to their smartphone customers as the T20 cricket season kicks off.The timeline will feature top Tweets from cricket leagues, teams, players, and commentators to give cricket fans among Vodafone’s over 200 million subscribers across the country.Further, one will receive an SMS alert with a link to the specially curated timeline on Twitter Lite where you can get live updates on the T20 cricket season.
The latest App is also specially optimised for India and it now supports 42 Indian languages including Hindi, Bengali, Kannada, Tamil and more. The app also offers offline viewing, meaning that even if one loses internet connectivity, he/she will be still able to access tweets.
The brand has also added a data saver mode, which further reduces the data usage by up to 70 per cent. In this mode, users will basically see a preview of images and videos before choosing which one to fully load.
India, is indeed, marred by a slow internet connectivity and the major tech companies are trying their level best to offer their services which work well with the present internet connections. Facebook rolled out its Lite app a few years back to tackle this problem and YouTube recently announced the launch of YouTube Go, which is aimed at the data-deprived users in the country.