Google's new system for beta testing Android apps has been put to use by Facebook, Snapchat, and many others since its introduction at Google I/O earlier this year. Now Twitter is getting in on the crowd-sourced testing fun, allowing interested Android users to sign up and beta test new versions of its official app before they are made available to the general public.

Signing up to test the Twitter for Android beta is the same process you use for Facebook and others: you have to join a specific Google Group, then elect to become a tester. Once you are in the program, new versions of the app will be delivered through the Google Play Store.

It's not possible to run both stable and beta versions of the app at the same time (as say, you can do with the Chrome and Chrome Beta browsers on Android), so if you are wary of bugs and potential instability, this might not be the best thing for you. But if you want to live on the bleeding edge of Twitter's development (or as close as you can get without actually being a Twitter employee), the beta channel is the way to go. And hey, you might be one of the first to see if Twitter reverts its widely panned "blue line" design for conversations that debuted earlier this week. That's worth something, right?