Twitter, no stranger to experimentation, has begun offering users a ‘While you were away…’ summary upon returning to the service.
Currently available to select iOS users, Twitter’s desire to disrupt the traditional chronological feed continues — it previously added lines physically connecting conversations, and offered a Discovery tab for popular content — by surfacing popular Tweets from the past few hours.
Like Facebook’s own feed algorithm, which displaced chronology in favour of popular posts, with this new feature Twitter is trying to address its biggest encumbrance to early adoption: missing large swaths of information that happened while the user was not scanning his or her feed.
The benefit to users is obvious: here are the most popular Tweets while you were away, so don’t feel like you missed out. Unfortunately, for such a feature to remain effective it has to surface not the most popular content but the most relevant Tweets to you. I may follow a few celebrities, but I don’t want to see their asinine verisimilitudes just because they have the most retweets.
Still, as a public company getting more users to actually interact with the service is Twitter’s goal for the year, and features like this — which inevitably imitate Facebook — are going to be divisive to users that want Twitter to stay exactly like it was back in 2007.
It’s unclear if Twitter plans to add this feature permanently to its repertoire — the company admits to experimenting with a lot of new things, many of which are shelved — but ‘While you were away’ feels like something that most people would appreciate.
[via]Techcrunch[/via]
