Twitter Working on Snapchat-Style Tool for Video Sharing: Report

Twitter is working on a Snapchat-style tool that makes it simpler for users to post videos on its app, Bloomberg reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter.

The social media company already has a working demo of the camera-centred product, Bloomberg reported, citing people who have seen it.

However, the design as well as the timing of the product's launch has not been settled upon and the tool could go through significant changes over the next few months, according to Bloomberg.

Twitter declined to comment on the report.

Last week, Twitter announced it was using machine learning to automatically cropping image previews on the social networking platform. Twitter uses use neural networks to identify salient features in an image preview. The feature is in process of being rolled out and will be available on desktop (twitter.com), iOS, and Android in the coming weeks.

In an official blog post, Twitter Researcher Lucas Theis and Software Engineer Zehan Wang claimed that the company's previous face detection method had several limitations in offering optimised image previews. To counter that, Twitter is coming up with a new tool that focuses on the "salient" regions in an image. "In general, people tend to pay more attention to faces, text, animals, but also other objects and regions of high contrast. This data can be used to train neural networks and other algorithms to predict what people might want to look at," said the blog post.

In instances mentioned in the post, Twitter's machine learning team compares Before and After shots to display the advantage the new technology is expected to have on image cropping. Images show focus on faces, food items, signboards, and vibrant objects to signify the prominent features.

Written with inputs from Reuters