Whatever Happened to Twitter's "Contributors" Feature?

Apr 2, 2013

Whatever happened to Twitter's proposed "contributors" feature? The feature, which would've enable account sharing for businesses, hasn't been mentioned since it was first announced on the Twitter blog more than 3 years ago:

The feature we are beta testing is called 'Contributors' – it enables users to engage in more authentic conversations with businesses by allowing those organizations to manage multiple contributors to their account. The feature appends the contributor's username to the tweet byline, making the business to consumer communication more personal; e.g. if @Twitter invites @Biz to tweet on its behalf, then a tweet from @Twitter would include @Biz in the byline so that users know more about the real people behind organizations.

Twitter's lack of internal delegation controls is a nuisance for business users. Unlike Facebook, which allows multiple page administrators with varying permission levels, to share an organizational Twitter account you must either share the account password with everyone on the team or pay a third party to provide a new front-end to manage permissions. This is sub-optimal, and an unnecessary expense for small businesses.

It seems Twitter has let this feature die on the vine, and that's unfortunate.