Twitter‘s Home feature also appears to target its quieter users, as Twopcharts estimates 44 per cent of its user base has never posted a tweet, preferring to watch conversations unfold.
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“We’ve already noticed that people who have used this new feature tend to retweet and tweet more, which is good for everyone”, he said. “While you were away” presents users with a small selection of recently popular tweets that they missed while offline.
Users can choose to opt out of the new algorithmic timeline.
According to Jahr, users will be able to go into Settings and turn it off and revert back to the traditional reverse chron timeline. “By becoming more Twitter-y”, Dorsey wrote.
CEO Jack Dorsey told analysts in a call that he’s determined to improve the results, including making Twitter “a leader in live streaming video” through its Periscope service. When you open Twitter again, you’ll see the tweets that the algorithm has chosen for you as the most interesting.
“Twitter is real-time. Twitter is about who & what you follow”.
“It’s actually a quite measured step in a direction that has seemed inevitable for some time now – a sort of “news briefing” section tacked on top of the timeline, rather than a reordering or reimagining of the timeline itself”.
GETTING IT – The changes will be offered to everyone on Twitter by the end of Wednesday.
Twitter said in a filing it had 320 million average monthly active users in the quarter, unchanged from the third quarter and lagging a forecast for 323 million users from RBC Capital Markets. “Twitter has always been considered a second screen for what’s happening in the world and we believe we can become the first screen for everything that is happening right now”. Earlier this week, BuzzFeed made it public that Twitter was following Facebook in pushing most liked tweets to the top of the page. However, there is no way but to risk such a backlash from Twitters loyal but small base of core users if the company is to grow its business. But promoted tweets will continue to show up in the regular feed. Twitter introduced “While you were away” past year and started allowing advertisers to pay for promoted tweets in 2010.
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Instead, people – especially teenagers – are gravitating to Snapchat and two other services owned by Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
