Twitter’s CEO making big product changes, but users not wowed

Investors are anxious about Twitter‘s slow user growth, ability to attract new users and the amount of time every user spends on the site or app.

Twitter is launching a First View feature that will allow marketers to place a video advert at the top of every user’s timeline for 24 hours.

The new feature is basically an expansion of the “while you were away” feature.

Instead of showing tweets as they are published, tweets may be organized based on relevancy, essentially, which ones you would care about most. It can be enabled and disabled should you find it more of a disturbance. Lesser the frequency, higher the number of tweets. Now, users who connect to Twitter will first be offered a series of “tweets” not in a reverse chronological thread, as was the case until now, but rather according to their relevance as assessed by an algorithm. Underneath it they will see the traditional reverse-chronological timeline. 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.

By one measure, Twitter’s user numbers actually declined in the fourth quarter. Twitter began rolling it out on Wednesday, but most of us won’t see it in our feed for another week or two. The developers at Twitter thought it’s time to make a big change so they’re releasing a new timeline option. Tap on the account Timeline personalization. However, users will be able to turn off the “never miss important tweets” setting to return to the normal ordered state.

The “while you were away” feature will still exists.

The “Show me the best tweets first” feature is available to people accessing Twitter using a web browser or applications on mobile devices powered by Apple or Android software.

Twitter’s team will be turning on the feature for everyone in the coming weeks, Jahr said, and will make it clear with a timeline notification. He already had to quell an uprising last weekend after news of revised timeline leaked out and triggered an avalanche of posts with the tag “RIPTwitter”.