Twitter introduces #Stickers, giving your timeline a taste of Snapchat

Twitter is introducing #Stickers, a new feature that lets you add tiny drawings or symbols — including silly hats and emoji — to the photos you tweet.

Rolling out on iOS and Android over the next few weeks, there will be hundreds of emoji, accessories and objects to stick on any of your photos. You can resize and rotate them, place them anywhere you like, and use as many as you want.

The stickers aren't just for aesthetics — they also act as visual hashtags.

When you see a sticker on a photo, you can tap it and open up a new feed of photos that include that specific sticker, so you can see how else that sticker is being used in the Twitterverse. You can use a sticker as simple visual flair or to join in on a conversation.

Stickers have been making their way in one form or another across all the major social networks. Facebook introduced stickers in Messenger, which can now be used in comments, too.

Snapchat has stickers similar to Twitter's new stickers in that you place them on photos or videos, although they're not searchable in the way Twitter's are.

Not that that's much of an advantage. While #Stickers in timelines are an interesting new feature, they will probably not be able to generate focused conversations like hashtags. Although they might be useful in making a few Twitter users aware of the them, finding a bunch of unrelated tweets using the same sticker probably won't inspire anyone to start a conversation around that sticker.