I was one of the lucky few South Africans that had access to #NewTwitter only a few days after it went live, and since then I have been playing around with it and discovering all sorts of new “hidden” features.

The #NewTwitter was created with ease of use in mind, no more navigating away from your main timeline to view images or videos, or going from page to page to follow a conversation between Twitter users, everything are now displayed on one page with the use of nifty slide out panels.

Apart from the fancy sliding panels there is a hidden features that I stumbled upon by accidentally hitting the R key on my keyboard. #NewTwitter has a handy set of keyboard shortcuts you can make use of.

After some playing around I found the above screen detailing a list of all available keyboard shortcuts for #NewTwitter. The shortcuts range from replying to tweets, retweeting, compiling new tweets, to going to certain user profiles with just the push of a button.

If you are enabled for #NewTwitter you can just press the ? key on your keyboard and it will bring up the above shortcut screen, now go test those shortcuts.

If you are on Twitter you can follow me at @diekloon

Just now when I logged into my Twitter account via the web I was greeted with the following screen.

I am now part of the Twitter Retweet beta group. This means I will now start to see retweets in a new way on the web. Retweets will no longer contain the RT prefix but will contain a new special icon as displayed in the screen above and a Retweeted by description below the tweet.

My tweets now also contain a new retweet link next to current reply link.

If you are on twitter why not follow me here