Twitter is on a quest to find the perfect new features that will finally grow its user base and make its investors happy. The latest the microblogging platform has been experimenting with is a new native polling feature that allows users to launch polls without having to leave the platform.
Twitter chief financial officer Anthony Noto was among the first Twitter users to showcase the feature. Noto asked a short but very important question: boxers or briefs? This is followed by two options, which users can tick to answer the question.
Noto's tweet does not show any URL leading to an external website, which suggests that the poll is embedded right into the platform. Users can already create polls on Twitter but only through third-party apps that take them outside the website, such as Twtpoll and Woobox. The poll also indicates that users only have 24 hours to answer the question.
Unfortunately, the new feature does not seem to work with third-party desktop platforms, such as TweetDeck. The poll also does not show up in embedded tweets, such as what you can see below.
Boxers or Briefs?
— Anthony Noto (@anthonynoto) September 24, 2015
Aly Pavela, a spokesperson for Twitter, confirms that the website is indeed working on a polling feature.
"We're experimenting with a new way to poll users on Twitter," Pavela says.
For now, the feature appears to be limited to a few users, including select members of the press and, not surprisingly, the bigwigs at Twitter. It is, of course, entirely possible that the polling feature does not pass through the testing stage and can go straight to Twitter's trash bin of ideas instead.
Twitter previously allowed companies and brands to launch polls for their followers using custom cards. In 2014, Twitter began testing a native polling feature that never saw the light of day.
The experimental feature comes at a crucial time for Twitter, which is struggling under pressure from investors to grow its user base of 300 million and appoint a permanent CEO. Earlier this week, Facebook-owned Instagram, which was launched just four years ago, announced it has surpassed Twitter's numbers and now has 400 million users. Twitter was launched in 2006.
