If you’ve ever spent any time trying to parse through your list of Twitter followers, than you know how time consuming it can be. “Who’s this guy?” you ask yourself, as you open up their profile in a new tab, just so you can read their little blurb about who they are and what they do and why you care.
Twitter’s latest feature, Hovercards, will offer that contextual information without making you ever open up another tab.
Twitter announced the feature last night, though for many unfortunate souls, such as myself, it has yet to go live. As with most Twitter features, this one will be rolled out over time.
As you can see above, the hovercard is like a business card that will appear whenever you mouseover another user’s name or avatar. The Twitter announcement says that this will happen in “any timeline” so we can only hope that this means it will work when you’re trying to organize who you follow into lists. We asked Twitter but didn’t receive a response by press.
The Twitter blog also notes that the hovercards will work for its new retweet format, showing you information about the person who is being retweeted. They will also let you direct message the person from within the hovercard. It seems like there could be other basic functionality too, from the looks of it, but its too early to tell.
Of course, this feature only affects those of you that actually still visit Twitter.com instead of using an third-party app, but it surely seems like a great tool for looking through your followers and trying to create lists.
