Popular social network Twitter has made some interesting changes to its services. Most recently, Twitter announced that it would no longer serve the “Egg” avatar that usually takes the place of default profile picture for new accounts. The social media design change was announced on Friday in a blog post on Twitter’s website, detailing the reasons for the action.
No more fun and cute little eggs
Twitter said that their team has noticed “patterns of behaviors” exhibited by accounts that appear to be created for the sole purpose of harassing others.
The account owners usually don’t bother to personalize their default avatars, which is why the fun and cute little eggs have come to be associated with negative behaviors. Twitter said that this “isn’t fair to people who are still new to Twitter” and who honestly haven’t had the chance to personalize their profile to express themselves better.
The evolution of the Twitter avatar
The egg avatar did not become the standard for Twitter’s profile picture until 2010. When it was first launched in 2006, the default profile was a silhouette of a man. It shifted into two round elements in 2007. The default avatar was a bird in 2009, and then it evolved into an egg avatar. After a series of design iterations, Twitter decided on a new default profile photo described as “a more gender-balanced figure.” The default colors are decided grays because of the generic and universal nature they represent.
To combat harassment and abuse online, the social media platform has also announced the mute button for specific words. This new Twitter avatar is another step the social media platform has taken.
More room for characters
In May last year, Twitter has announced that some changes have been made to ease the 140-character limit.
Usernames no longer count toward the total character number, and media attachments—photos, GIFs, videos, polls, quotes—do not eat up the space of your messages. The social media giant has followed-up on that move and recently announced more space is available for replies. Usernames now don’t count toward the 140 characters in your replies so that they won’t block the start of a reply tweet.
