When you work at Twitter, you get near-daily updates to the app to test. These beta versions often provide a glimpse of new features, and most of them are small. So when a major update landed two weeks ago, one thing stood out: The quill icon, which everyone knows you press to compose a tweet, was no longer an icon, but a single word: Tweet. This experiment in iconography didn't last. A subsequent update brought a new tweet button, and another after that.

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