Twitter tweaks its timeline to look a bit more like Facebook

When logging onto Twitter, they’ll see the tweets that Twitter’s algorithm believes they’re most likely to care about at the top of their timeline, going in reverse chronological order as they scroll down the new timeline.

Dorsey reiterated the company’s desire to make the timeline easier to use and get more users engaged with it. He noted that the feature announced today increased tweeting and retweeting during testing.

The rest of the timeline will appear below in the usual way and the feature can be removed simply by refreshing the feed, he added.

Twitter’s rumored adoption of a full algorithmic feed for users, a la Facebook, has been a point of contention for many users recently.

And so for now, the new feature can be turned off in account settings and is only an element of the old timeline. Advocates for a ranked timeline say it always outperforms chronological timelines in user surveys, even when users say they prefer the latter. But the company can’t afford to stand pat with its user growth slowing dramatically and its stock price plummeting by more than 50 per cent since co-founder Jack Dorsey returned as CEO last summer. It is also hoping that the recent update would make them come back and use the service more often than they did before. A number of them continued to voice their opposition under the #RIPTwitter hashtag today, with comments like, “By introducing “The Algorithm” – Twitter is dictating what you see”, and “I welcome our algorithmic overlords” as well as “So now Twitter is dying slowly”.

For those who like Twitter the way it is, don’t panic. The service also made an entirely different section of the app that allows users to discover tweets and conversations that might be hard to find for those users who aren’t regular visitors of the service.

Revenues for the whole of 2015 were up 58% $2.2bn (£1.5bn) representing “another very strong year for Twitter”.

The timeline and the Likes changes are just a few of Twitter’s efforts at a jump-start. Reaction was more muted on Wednesday after the changes to the timeline ended up being more minor than a BuzzFeed article originally suggested.

Instead, people – especially teenagers – are gravitating to Snapchat and two other services owned by Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.