Twitter announced on Wednesday that its new, “Show me the best tweets first,” timeline is finally rolling out today. The new feature kicked up a lot of criticism since it was first brought into light a few days ago, even triggering a response from Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey himself, but it doesn’t seem too bad today.
The new algorithmic timeline makes Twitter’s home view more like Facebook, to be completely honest. Instead of the traditional reverse chronological order that Twitter has been following for ages, the new feature will bring up ‘recommended’ tweets. These tweets depend on the users past activity, personal interests, people they are following and a whole lot more, making your timeline more personalized.
For those of you who are against this sort of trend on the micro-blogging website, there’s good news too. The new timeline is strictly opt-in, just like we reported earlier, and you can turn it off whenever you feel like it.
The new feature is, in fact, very similar to the currently trendy “While You Were Away” feature. Once you log in to your Twitter account, the tweets you’re most likely to care about will appear at the top of your timeline– still recent and in reverse chronological order. The remainder of your tweets will remain in the plain old reverse chronological order.
We think this is gonna make life easier across the spectrum for users,
Michelle Haq, Twitter product manager, said.
We noticed across the board this caused users to create and interact more. We do prioritize transparency and control, so our customers have a choice. They can turn the experience off in settings, they can get curious and turn it back on, this is an option.
The rest of the timeline will supposedly work in the same way it does right now. You can browse through the tweets like you normally do and select any tweet to see the whole conversation.
The new feature, even though sounds a lot like Facebook, doesn’t entirely duplicate the workings of the rival’s timeline. The feature will have very less influence on what you see as it attempt to show the most important stuff to you in reverse chronological order rather than just the top ones ranked up.
Also, if you want to go back to normal view, just pull down to refresh and everything goes back the way it should be. The feature is currently rolling out for the iPhone, Android phones and Twitter.com. To enable it, simply head over to the timeline section in the settings.
Mike Jahr, Senior Engineering Manager, wrote in the blog post announcing the new timeline feature:
We’ve already seen that people who use this new feature tend to Retweet and Tweet more, creating more live commentary and conversations, which is great for everyone. To check it out now, just go into the timeline section of your settings and choose ‘Show me the best Tweets first’. We’ll be listening to your feedback and making it even better over time. Then we’ll be turning on the feature for you in coming weeks — look out for a notification in your timeline. We love it and think you will too. If you don’t, send your thoughts our way, and you can easily turn it off in settings.
“Show me the best tweets first” will surely be highly beneficial for brands. Huge brands can rise to the top of timelines if they end up preparing some high quality tweets which will provide great visibility for them.
Our users are really enthusiastic,
Haq said.
To me that’s a plus, we never have to beg for feedback from users like other companies do. We’re really excited to announce this tomorrow, set the record straight, emphasize it’s an option for them, emphasize the problem we’re trying to solve, and see what they say.
The new feature comes in after many big and small changes to Twitter under the leadership of its new CEO, Jack Dorsey. Since he took over the chariot running Twitter, the American programmer and entrepreneur has brought about some surprising changes in the way the website works.
The update stands to state that Twitter still has cards up its sleeve. Twitter’s stocks are slowly and not-so-surprisingly dying and have been doing so for a while now. The latest updates coming over the past few months seem to be trials by the tech firm to reassure investors that Twitter can still turn the game.
