The next time you log into Twitter, you may see something a bit different from your regular news feed. As has been noted by The Guardian, Twitter users are starting to see a new Timeline Highlights feature in the place of their regular feed. Right now it’s still being rolled out, so not everyone has it yet. Additionally, per Business Insider, it appears to be limited to those using the Twitter iOS app, but it will reach everyone in the near future.
While you were away
The Timeline Highlights feature shows up at the top of people’s news feed and picks out older tweets that people are likely to be interested in but may have missed. They are identified with a “While you were away…” header.
This is something that Twitter has planned on doing for a while, and in a post on the Twitter blog, they stated:
Right now, what you see of the 500 million Tweets published every day is based entirely on who you follow, and that’s a great model for many people. But with that many Tweets every day, there’s no way even the most avid Twitter user will find everything that’s relevant to their interests in any particular moment.
The blog post also somewhat explains how they’ll pick tweets that they feel are most relevant:
We can use information like who you follow and what you engage with to surface highlights of what you missed and show those to you as soon as you log back in or come back to the app.
This new feature appears to need some fine tuning, though, because it doesn’t appear that Twitter’s doing a great job of determining when people were “away.”
Why does twitter show me tweets from last night "while you were away" .. Wack
— Tyler Dvorak (@tylerdv0rak) December 24, 2014
More like the Monification than the Facebookification
As many have noted, in spite of the impressive 500 million tweets per day stat, Twitter still lags far behind Facebook in users, with a mere 284 million to Facebook’s 1.3 billion. Along with trying to attract new users that are intimidated / turned off by the manic number of tweets you find in most feeds by giving a Reader’s Digest version of the site, they’re probably paving the way for a new advertising option. My theory is that along with the latest celebrity scandal and TV show gossip, you’ll see sponsored tweets showing up as well after people have adapted to the new feature (read: stopped complaining about it).
Image Credit: Rosaura Ochoa