Mumbai: One of Twitter’s biggest draws has been its standard layout that hasn’t seen many drastic changes throughout its eight-year history, especially in comparison to Facebook, whose newsfeed has gone through many tweaks and redesigns over the years. But of late, it has seen quite a few changes, and going by the recent comments from Twitter executives, more seem to be in the offing. And as is tradition, users don’t seem too happy about it.
Twitter CFO Anthony Noto, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, hinted that the company may be considering making significant changes to how tweets are surfaced in users’ main timelines. He said, “If you think about our search capabilities we have a great data set of topical information about topical tweets.” He believes that this opens up the opportunity for ‘an algorithm that delivers the depth and breadth of the content we have on a specific topic and then eventually as it relates to people.’ So far, Twitter has surfaced tweets in reverse chronological order, regardless of relevance or any other criteria. While users have become accustomed to seeing their most recent tweets first, this approach ‘isn’t the most relevant experience for a user,’ according to Noto.
When news broke out, unsurprisingly, many users weren’t happy with the idea of Twitter toying with how their main timeline could look. And ironically, they took to Twitter to vent their reservations.
Noto’s latest remarks seem to be in line with previous comments from CEO Dick Costolo, who in an interview with AdWeek, had said that while no deadline has been set to roll out these tweaks, the company isn’t ruling out any changes.
It’s a known fact that Twitter has never used algorithms the way other social networks like Facebook have, but the company has been inching towards making changes to what users see in their feeds. Recently upgrades like surfacing favourites, including those from accounts people aren’t following, in users’ timelines, had mixed reactions. When the new changes do finally roll out, users sure will vent more, but who knows, they might even start liking the website’s new look more.
