Mumbai: Like all social media sites, Twitter is also going through a constant wave of changes; some which will totally change the way people use the micro-blogging site.
Well, as the company steps up its effort to make the platform better for users, it has discreetly retired the Magic Recs bot—a Twitter account that used to send direct messages to users to recommend viral accounts or Tweets to follow.
The bot account sent instant DMs based on an algorithm that measured the number of users you knew and what account or tweet they were following.
Twitter also confirmed the development to TechCrunch and said that it is channelling recommendations through push notifications rather than sending DMs.
According to a written statement from a twitter spoekesperson, the MagicRecs account is not regularly sending direct messages. Recommendations that were previously shared via DMs will only be delivered via push notifications.
The bot account kicked off proceedings back in June 2013; the push notifications were added a few months later, in September.
After coexisting together for more than 2.5 years, the Magic Recs handle will be taken down due to inactivity of the bot; the last tweet it sent out was over a year ago.
While Magic Recs was the most prominent Twitter direct messaging-based activity notifier, there were other experiments in the past such as Event Parrot (for news) which are not active now.
Although Magic Recs had around 1,12,000 followers when it was retired, it was still not enough for pushing notifications to less-active users; users had to follow the bot’s account to get the recommendations.
On the other hand, push notifications have been far more successful with a significant boom in the user of mobile users. Currently, Twitter has around 257.3 million mobile users, which is 83 per cent of the company’s 310 million monthly users.
Also, users do not have to follow any account to get push notifications as they are already activated by default.
