Twitter has announced a new version of their platform for people living in areas of poor connectivity. This comes days after Minister for Communications, Denis Naughten, provided an update on the rollout of the National Broadband Plan in Ireland.
Some 300,000 premises around the country will receive high-speed broadband by December 2018. It's hoped that the National Broadband Plan will be completed by 2020. Until that time, users in areas with poor connectivity can avail of the newly announced Twitter Lite.
Twitter announced the new mobile experience in a blog post on Thursday morning.
"There are several barriers to using Twitter, including slow mobile networks, expensive data plans, or lack of storage on mobile devices. While smartphone adoption grew to 3.8 billion connections by the end of 2016, 45% of mobile connections are still on slower 2G networks, according to GSMA," the post said.
Twitter Lite is a faster, data friendly way for people to use Twitter to see what’s happening in the world.
👉 https://t.co/AIUgyCAFj0 pic.twitter.com/9EIG7pgK6O
— Twitter (@Twitter) April 6, 2017
"Today, we are rolling out Twitter Lite, a new mobile web experience which minimizes data usage, loads quickly on slower connections, is resilient on unreliable mobile networks, and takes up less than 1MB on your device," it continued.
The company says the Lite version will make the platform more accessible to millions of people around the world.
Twitter Lite also features a 'data saver mode', which will reduce the amount of mobile data used by the site. Whilst in this mode, users will see a preview of images and videos and can select which of those they want to fully load.
"This can reduce your data usage by up to 70%," says Twitter.
The new site is available around the world by visiting mobile.twitter.com on a smartphone or tablet.
It is possible to enable 'data saver' mode on the main Twitter app too. This is done within the settings of the app. Users have a series of options that will allow them to control their data usage.
Disabling image previews and ensuring 'Video autoplay' is set for Wifi only will help save that precious data.
