Messaging apps are a dime a dozen nowadays, which is companies like Yahoo have been forced to get creative when releasing their own messaging apps. Putting the Yahoo branding on a messaging app isn’t going to be enough to convince people to switch over from LINE or WhatsApp, so Yahoo has to take a completely unique approach to messaging, which is what it did with Livetext. The same goes for Microsoft, but the company’s messaging app isn’t nearly as unique as Livetext is. In fact, it’s basically just Instagram with a messaging format. 

The premise of Twist, Microsoft’s new “photo conversation” app, is relatively simple: sometimes, a picture is worth all the words. Stealing a page from Instagram and other photo-based apps, the Twist app is the latest from Microsoft Garage, an experimental app development shop within Microsoft. With Twist, users exchange photos in a fleeting, casual conversation, letting the photos (with a few snippets of embedded text) tell the story. But Microsoft deliberately laid out Twist so that one picture runs into another, creating either a flow of images, an ironic juxtaposition, a mashup, or more. Microsoft researchers said they were inspired by how some people are now not only using image memes as commentary, but to communicate as well. “When we were designing Twist, we observed that many of the digital ways people communicate today don’t allow for rich, expressive exchanges,” says Jennifer Shen, the principal program manager lead whose Silicon Valley-based team built Twist, in a blog post. “Many messaging apps are adding functionality to make their experiences feel richer, such as stickers, emoji and animated gifs. We wanted to look at ways we could make that experience even better.”