Twitter’s timeline has been where we interact and see what tweets people we follow or listed have posted. It is usually in real time and gave Twitter its unique niche as the place to be when you want to follow an event as it happens.
However, Twitter has been making subtle changes to the timeline because as awesome as the real time nature of the timeline is, it has a glaring problem. It is rather easy to miss out on what has happened when you were offline. That is why the company introduced the “While you were away” feature on mobile that informs you of few tweets that Twitter thinks you might be interested in that happened a while ago.
This signaled that Twitter was using underlying algorithms to suggest to you tweets that you would like to use. However, there was a rumour that Twitter will finally launch a new timeline that will use algorithms to change the classic real time chronological order to a reverse chronological order. This prompted Twitter users to trend the #RIPTwitter hashtag where they lamented about the impending change.
The funny thing is that Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s CEO and co-founder responded to the hashtag where he tweeted and I quote “I want you all to know we’re always listening. We never planned to reorder timelines next week.” He went on to say “Twitter is live. Twitter is real time. Twitter is about who & what you follow. And Twitter is here to stay! By becoming more Twitter-y”
Hello Twitter! Regarding #RIPTwitter: I want you all to know we're always listening. We never planned to reorder timelines next week.
— jack (@jack) February 6, 2016
Twitter is live. Twitter is real-time. Twitter is about who & what you follow. And Twitter is here to stay! By becoming more Twitter-y.
— jack (@jack) February 6, 2016
Funny enough 3 days later, his company today announced the new timeline order which disregards his earlier statements.
https://twitter.com/twitter/status/697420917253668868
In the new timeline, there is an option on settings called “show me the best tweets first” that will allow you to see the best tweets of the people you follow in reverse chronological order. You can check how to change this on Web, Twitter for iOS or Twitter for Android here. If you want to keep up with the new tweets, you only need to pull to refresh and they will appear at the top.
The good thing about the new feature is that it is optional and not mandatory so if you would love to keep up with past updates of your friends, you are free to do so. Twitter’s timeline has had a drastic change this week, so will change with it?
