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Meet Twitter's 'While You Where Away' Feature
We
usually miss out on most of the tweets on our timeline while we are
away. Things will be changing soon as Twitter will implement a new
feature called ‘While you were away’, which pins what
Twitter considers to be the “best tweets”, at the top of the
user’s timeline.
It
is a simple recap of relevant tweets that the users have missed since
their last login, but Twitter is yet to elaborate the algorithm based
on which tweets are displayed. Speculation is that tweets to be
highlighted are determined based on metrics like the number of
favorites and retweets. With this new feature, twitter aims at making
tweets that are interesting to the user easy to discover. Moreover,
you don’t have to pay attention to everything, but at the same time
you don’t miss the stuffs that matter to you. As the ‘While you
were away’ feature gives you a brief rundown of what all happened
in your absence, this way important tweets are not drowned out by the
rapid flow of tweets and also you are saved from the avalanche of
rolling thoughts and pictures.
It
works in a similar fashion to Facebook’s news feed, which displays
status updates and posts in a ranked manner (usually
non-chronological). This recap feature is the first major
non-chronological feature to rap Twitter.
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| This new feature aims at boosting user engagement |
This
is certainly not the first instance of people being overwhelmed by
such a recap feature. There already exist certain services solely for
fishing important posts-Nuzzel, for example, taps into your Facebook
and Twitter network to trawl stories that are popular with people you
know. In addition, Twitter already has email alerts for that purpose
too. News.Me picks out five important tweets in a day from your
timeline, and sends them as an email digest.
According
to the Twitter CFO, Anthony Noto, “[Tweets being in reverse
chronological order] isn’t the most relevant experience for a user.
Putting that content in front of the person at that moment in time is
a way to organize that content better.”
Ahead
of its release, in November, the company described the recap feature
saying, “Every time you open the Twitter app, you’ll see
something great”. It also mentioned its another upcoming
‘Instant Timeline’ feature, which will offer content
without needing users to search for accounts to follow and is
scheduled to be released in early 2015.
The
new features are a part of Twitter’s plan to rein in Facebook’s
lead and to boost user engagement. There are still a lot of things we
don’t know about this new recap feature and since Twitter has
declined to comment, it might stay the same for a while.
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| As for the reaction, it has been a mixed bag |
Presently,
this feature is only available to some users across the globe, but a
gradual rollout to more is expected. So far, user reaction has
been a mixed bag, ranging from demands for complete rollout to one of
confusion and frustration.
Now
the big question that arises here is whether Twitter is on the path
to becoming Facebook or not. For many, this move seems as an indication
that Twitter might be inching closer to becoming a lot like Facebook and losing it's true essence.
If so, why use Twitter at all?
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