Twitter launched its Twitter Lite platform today focusing on the emerging markets with not the best of internet connectivity. To clarify first, Twitter Lite is not an App but a mobile web app. So you will not find it on the Google Play Store or App Store instead you will have to access it by visiting mobile.twitter.com. Before we get into the in-depth analysis, let’s first set up Twitter Lite.
As mentioned before, you have to first open up mobile.twitter.com from your mobile (or tablet) device after which you will have to enter your credentials to log in. Once done, the web page which now shows up is Twitter Lite. However, instead of using it through your Browser every now and then, the web page will give you an option to add the web page (Twitter Lite) to your Homescreen. Otherwise, if you are using Google Chrome, just hit the ‘three-dot menu’ and tap on ‘Add to Home screen’
Twitter Lite is essentially a mobile web app and as the company claims is extremely light on both data usage and your device’s memory. Opening up the web app, you will see four tabs namely – Home, Search, Notifications and Messages. You can access your Profile by tapping onto your profile picture on the top left corner. Getting inside the Profile menu will let you access your profile information, Lists and also pop up for ‘Who to follow’. In short, the interface is pretty similar to previous versions. Apart from this, there is also a dedicated Data Saver mode which lets you choose which image should load up in full capacity saving up to 70 percent of data usage.
Even though its a mobile web app, you can still get push notifications by enabling it from the settings which in turn can be accessed by tapping on the little settings icon in the Notifications tab. Else, you can also get notifications via SMS.
Apart from this, Twitter has also joined hands with Vodafone in India to provide live cricket updates to keep track on the latest happenings in the cricket world. To explain, the timeline will feature top Tweets from cricket leagues, teams, players, and commentators for cricket fans among Vodafone’s over 200 million subscribers across the country.
How useful isTwitter Lite?
Twitter Lite is majorly developed to cater to audiences with low and poor internet connectivity. To test out the credibility, we used Twitter Lite on 2G network and it worked just fine if not the best. The content loads up pretty fast and you will surely find yourself saving a lot on your Mobile Data charges. Or more importantly, when 4G data is absent.
While not a lot of people in India are a part of Twitterati, Twitter Lite is still a welcome update. At a time when India is fast catching up in the mobile data race, courtesy Reliance Jio, companies like Twitter, Facebook and even YouTube with its recent YouTube Go are trying to reposition themselves for the new opportunities better data access will throw up.