Twitter is working on a tab that shows off a user’s NFT collection, and it’s beginning to look a lot more complete. The platform first began working on the feature in September — a tweet from Mada Aflak, a software engineer for Twitter, first showed off the early stages of its experiment in late September.
The tweet’s video demonstrates how you can connect your crypto wallet from popular providers like Coinbase, Metamask, and Crypto.com and then choose one of your NFTs to use as your profile picture. Your full collection of NFTs will be stored in a tab on your profile, labeled Collectibles.
Once selected, your profile picture will have a small badge that verifies that it’s a real NFT. Twitter hinted at letting users verify the NFTs they tweet back in September, so that detail doesn’t come as much of a surprise.
These were the earlier stages of the feature, and reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong just showed off how it has changed since then. She sent out a tweet showing a slightly more detailed version than the glimpse we got originally.
In addition to the Collectibles tab, Wong revealed that Twitter is working on a view that lets you get a close-up look at an NFT. You’ll also be able to tap through to a page that shows detailed information about the NFT, including a description, its creator, any properties, as well as some information about the collection. One change to note about the Collectibles tab is that it looks like it’ll take the place of the Likes tab on your profile — Wong notes that you’ll have to scroll horizontally to reach it.
A feature dedicated to NFTs is definitely nice to have, but it also shows Twitter’s disregard for more pressing issues on the platform. As developer Nathan Lawrence points out, Twitter could be using its resources to add better features dedicated to fighting misinformation.
We spent years begging Twitter for features to combat disinformation. We finally got Birdwatch, which is better than I expected, but so hidden that I suspect most people don’t know it exists.
This elevates NFTs to a UI level that _fact checking_ never got.
— Nathan Lawrence (@NathanBLawrence) October 24, 2021
Lawrence also noted something even more concerning: Twitter appears to have integrated NFTs into its interface, while misinformation prevention tool Birdwatch remains hidden on a dedicated portion of the site. Twitter launched Birdwatch, a crowdsourced misinformation tool that empowers the community to identify and flag questionable content, in January. Since its launch, we really haven’t heard much about it besides the fact that Birdwatch notes now appear in tweets. Overall, it’s not a great look for Twitter.