Twitter updates iOS, Android and Web apps to offer conversation threads on timeline, ability to share tweets and more

Popular social networking service Twitter has updated its iPhone and Android apps, as well as the Web interface to allow users to easily discover and follow conversations.

Conversations are a major part of the Twitter experience as it's essentially how users interact with each other and build threads around a particular topic of interest. While Twitter's native apps allowed users to track and follow conversations if they happened to appear in their timeline, by tracing back from an individual tweet, the apps did not make conversations an integral part of the users' timeline.

Following the update, up to three tweets that are part of a conversation will appear connected with a blue coloured vertical line. The entire conversations thread can be opened by just tapping on one of the tweets and users will even see replies from other people who they don't follow.

The updated apps also allow users to share conversations over email with anyone. The updated iPhone and Android apps also let users share individual Tweets over email, and the Android app lets users share tweets via direct messages (DM), as well. This feature was only available on third-party apps, previously.

The update also brings the ability to report individual tweets for abuse or spam directly from Twitter to the Android app and the Twitter Web interface. The feature was already available on Twitter for iPhone but will be rolling out gradually to other users.

The update also reduces the size of the Twitter Android app for entry-level Android smartphones with limited storage, such as the Samsung Galaxy Y, HTC Explorer, Micromax Bolt and others. For these devices, the Twitter app is now less than half the previous size, making it much faster to download and will leave more space for other apps, which will come in handy on phones with limited internal storage.

While the update makes it easy to spot conversations in the timeline, it changes the order of conversations from reverse chronological order (newest first) that experienced users are used to in third-party apps and switches to a 'newbie-friendly' oldest tweet first format. It also makes conversations inconsistent with the rest of the tweets in the timeline.