The headline is meant to be taken quite literally. In Apple’s app store, Twitter has changed its category from “Social” to “News”. In separate articles Sarah Perez and Dieter Bohn looked into why this change may have been made:

• Twitter had another disappointing financial quarter, with its share price plummeting soon after the results were announced.
• Part of the problem is that everybody compares Twitter, and its (relatively) small user base, to the massive pool of users that Facebook has.
• Instead of trying to compete with Facebook head on in social networks, executives may want to change the conversation so that they’re no longer being compared to Facebook and instead define their own category.
• After all, no one really tries comparing LinkedIn’s user base with Facebook as a measure of LinkedIn’s success – because we think of LinkedIn as existing in a category distinct from Facebook.
• It also has a more practical implication. On Apple’s app store Twitter was ranked the #5 most popular social networking app.
• As a news app it’s the #1 app of its category – massively increasing exposure and possibly even improving overall ranking numbers.

Read more on the two authors’ takes here and here.

Source: TechCrunch and The Verge