Twitter launches multiple new features for Windows Phone, including in-stream translation

Twitter launched a raft of new features for Windows Phone today, including photos from Twitter on the lock screen, more languages, quicker search, notifications, and more.

And interestingly, automatic in-stream translation of tweets in 54 languages.

The new Twitter for Windows Phone enables both tweets and photos from people you follow on Twitter to appear on the phone’s lock screen, an interesting addition that’s a little reminiscent of what Facebook is doing with Facebook Home on Android. Simply add your account to the “configure lock screen” option in the app settings, and your lock screen is social.

In addition, the Windows Phone version of the Twitter app now permit you to pin keyword searches to your homescreen, meaning that you’re never more than one swipe away from seeing what people are tweeting about your business, your favorite sports team, or a hot topic in the news. That’s a fairly cool feature, and it’s an excellent example of Twitter maximizing its app on Windows Phone for exactly what Windows Phone is good at: a single, holistic, app-free high-level view of what’s happening in your world.

Perhaps the coolest new feature is in-stream translation of tweets.

Twitter is increasingly international, as we saw clearly in its recent pre-IPO S1 filing, and with Bing powering the translations, Twitter will now give you a choice of 54 supported languages for translations of foreign tweets, right in the app. Now you can communicate with people from many different countries in many different languages, right inside the Twitter app.

The new Twitter app for Windows Phone also offers mobile notifications, which you can limit to people you follow, improvements to search and discover, and a new dark or light theme choice, possibly to highlight the new media-centric focus of Twitter and its apps.

The new features are a coup for Microsoft, which is getting an app for its mobile platform that isn’t a rebrand of another platform’s app but a fully integrated, fully native, and fully optimized app just for Windows Phone.