What You Need To Know About Twitter’s New Timeline

Twitter has been making changes to the way it works but is lagging behind market leader Facebook on a number of fronts including earnings and user numbers. The developers at Twitter thought it’s time to make a big change so they’re releasing a new timeline option.

Twitter announced earlier Wednesday it was revamping its timeline, allowing the “best” tweets to rise to the top, despite warnings of a revolt from members loyal to the real-time flow of the messaging platform. While Facebook makes use of users’ preferences to showcase what they see, Twitter has a rather different approach. It will be turned on in settings, and if users don’t do so then it will never appear in the timeline, Twitter said.

Twitter has also confirmed that a new algorithmic feed similar to its “while you were away” feature will be introduced.

This new feature will be able to display older tweets first that are also out of chronological order but are considered to be what users might want to see. Below the new timeline tweets, the normal newsfeed, in reverse chronological, will load as it did in the past.

Twitter added that it has “five priorities” for 2016, including to deal with the “confusing” aspects of the site, such as how users can reply to messages both publicly and more directly using the site’s existing rules.

“We think there’s a lot of opportunity in our product to fix some broken windows that we know are inhibiting growth”, Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s CEO and cofounder, said in a conference call with analysts. Meaning that users won’t see the feature unless it is manually activated. Turning off the feature is universal so you won’t need to worry about disabling it manually across all your devices. 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.

The “While you were away” feature was created for people who may have spent hours or days away from Twitter.

Twitter said it analysed how users have engaged with billions of tweets to determine what they are most interested in.