He said the firm wanted to “make everything more intuitive”, admitting the service was confusing for new users.
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Jack Dorsey, Twitter‘s chief executive and co-founder, tried to reassure users in a series of tweets last week that Twitter would remain the place for live news and commentary.
It is unclear whether the changes will also see some paid-for promoted tweets pushed to the top of people’s timelines at this stage. This came immediately after the social network’s fourth quarter results revealed that the user growth of the platform had stalled unexpectedly from October to December 2015, resulted in a R1,4 billion net loss over that period.
The social media company, which has long shown an endless stream of tweets in reverse-chronological order, announced today it will now serve users with an algorithmic timeline that will show tweets out of order.
Twitter also lost another $90 million during the final three months of a year ago, preserving its profitless history, as shares fell 6.6 per cent in after-hours trading. 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. It will be turned on in settings, and if users don’t do so then it will never appear in the timeline, Twitter said. Meaning that users won’t see the feature unless it is manually activated. It is not much different from its previous timeline except that it displays contents based on what the algorithm thinks the user prefers to see. “We’ve already noticed that people who have used this new feature tend to retweet and tweet more”.
At the same time, Twitter has yet to turn a profit.
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Refining our core service and making it more intuitive, investing in live-streaming video, giving creators and influencers the best tools, investing in making Twitter safer and better supporting developers. Twitter wasn’t the only stock to have a bad day-the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted 255 points to close at 15,660, nearing a two-year low-but Twitter’s steep decline comes after bad news in the company’s earnings report released.
