Twitter is not new to experiments due to the fact that in the social networking industry, it is imperative to innovate so as to keep your user base engaged and to invite new ones. This new experiment they have confirmed they are working on is all about displaying trending tweets on the timeline.
If you use the official apps, there is a feature dubbed “While you were away” and these trending topics are displayed in that manner. If they are not of interest to you, you can just close them by hitting the ‘x’ button at the right corner just like the ‘while you were away’ highlights.
Trending topic in my Twitter timeline w tweets from people I don't follow. Interesting….. pic.twitter.com/OQumdpG1u4
— Jason Abbruzzese (@JasonAbbruzzese) January 31, 2016
According to a report by VentureBeat, Twitter confirmed they were indeed testing the feature where in this case, the Australian Open was being recommended to the writer. Just like how Facebook tailors your News Feed according to your interests, Twitter can do this by combing through your data and recommending the right hashtags that you should follow.
Recently, Twitter was also reported to be conducting a test where they will not be showing ads to prominent users on the network due to their influence. There was also a test a while ago where the tweets were displayed not according to their time of posting which was confusing to users.
However for this test, it will be a great idea for the company so as to feed the 320 million active users with the hashtags of interest so as to be more active on the platform. Paired with an imminent launch of Moments will make finding content easier and for users to follow what interests them on Twitter. We only have to see if they will launch these in the course of the year.
