If you discount SMS-only users – who don’t really count – Twitter lost two million users in its last quarter.
Advertisement
Twitter said the “Show me the best tweets first” feature is optional and that users can stick with tweets rushing by like leaves on a fast-moving river, if they prefer.
Twitter is introducing algorithmic timelines for the first time, doing away with a almost ten-year history of showing updates in chronological order. Twitter said that it will 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”. Based on that analysis, Twitter will begin featuring tweets that it believes will be most likely to capture a user’s interest at the top of the timeline.
Twitter’s monthly active user base, unchanged from the previous quarter, is being closely watched to see if it connecting with more people and keeping pace with other social networks. The new algorithm is at an opt-in basis, meaning users can toggle it on or off if they want.
This could be good news for some musicians on Twitter: the more engaged their fans are in terms of liking and retweeting them, the more likely those tweets will be to appear at the top of the timeline. Twitter claims that its usage numbers are now on the rise; monthly visitors at the end of January returned to the same levels as in late September, CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey said on a conference call to analysts and investors. It will work in a similar manner to Facebook’s Suggested Posts and Suggested Videos, as it will be the first thing users see on their feeds when they log in. Excluding certain users that access tweets via text messages, the number of users dropped in the fourth-quarter to 305 million. “We are going to fix the broken windows and confusing parts of the service”, Twitter wrote in a letter accompany the fourth-quarter report. It can be enabled and disabled should you find it more of a disturbance.
Advertisement
“Whether it’s breaking news, entertainment, sports or everyday topics, hearing about and watching a live event unfold is the fastest way to understand the power of Twitter”, Dorsey said.
