Twitter enables live stream for breaking news

Twitter users in the US may have noticed a new feature on the social media platform. A small window just next to their timeline that showed a live stream of Miami news station WSVN 7's coverage of the active shooter situation. The stream was the debut of a live stream feature for breaking news events.

Users who clicked on the live stream landed on the feed of tweets that were related to the news. Twitter video GM Kayvon Beykpour believes that launch was a part of Twitter's vision of providing credible information.

"By pairing live video with the conversation on Twitter, there is no faster way to see what's happening in the world," he told BuzzFeed in an email.

Twitter has partnered with local news channels to source the streams. The first stream had more than 50,000 simultaneous viewers at its peak.

According to BuzzFeed, the feature is "currently rolled out across the platform," however, the feature might work only on the web version of the platform for now.

In December, the company announced that it will now let its 300 million+ users install third party apps for two-factor authentication to verify their accounts. Up until now, users could only verify their accounts with a code sent via a text message.

However, thanks to an update rolled out by Twitter, as an alternative to SMS, users can also use a third-party authenticator app such as Google Authenticator, Duo Mobile, Authy or similar installed on their mobile device.

"You'll now be able to use a third party app for two-factor authentication instead of SMS text messages," announced Twitter.

These third-party apps work independently and generate codes offline to help you use the two-factor authentication. While Twitter has also made it clear that it will still depend on SMS as two-factor authentication, it will now allow third-party apps as an alternative.

The micro-blogging site has also given a step-by-step direction on how to use the third-party apps. This will prove to be an important move taken by Twitter due to the fact that SMS-based two-factor authentication uses static codes.

So basically, these codes could be taken hold of in the event a hacker or some other malicious third-party has access to one or more alternative ways of viewing messages on a device apart from having physical access to it.