Ever find yourself constantly scrolling through the same old rubbish on Twitter every five minutes. Silly question, we all do it. You constantly check to see if anything interesting has happened in the 5 minutes since your last check, much like checking the fridge for food at midnight when you know full well it’s empty. Well those days are soon to be over, as Twitter announces it’s new ‘best tweets’ feature.
Twitter will begin to roll out this new feature, that will show users about a dozen curated tweets at the top of their timeline, all popular tweets which the user is most likely to want to see. The tweets will appear at the top of users’ timelines, with all other tweets appearing as usual underneath.
The tool uses the same technology as Twitter’s “While You Were Away” feature and is basically formatted in the same way, albeit hopefully more useful. Let’s face it, half of the “While You Were Away” tweets sort of made you glad that you’d been away.
The ‘Best Tweets’ feature is designed to include tweets from accounts with which users engage with most; and we all know we have that one account we always go to, whether it be for sports news or funny dog vines. As well as these accounts, it will also include tweets that are simply popular at this moment in time, most likely depending on how many retweets and favourites it has. Rather than focusing on users that have been away from the app for hours, like the “While You Were Away” feature, “Best Tweets” will focus on users who re-open the app after shorter periods of time.
Mike Jahr, senior engineering manager at Twitter said “You follow hundreds of people on Twitter, maybe even thousands, and when you open Twitter, you may feel like you’ve missed their most important tweets.” Yep, we’ve all been there, missing the only tweet that everyone else is talking about. He continues to state that “Starting today, you can choose a new timeline feature that helps you catch up on the most important tweets from the people you follow.”
Twitter has said that tests showed people tend to tweet and retweet more often with this feature. If that trend continues, it could boost the site’s user activity and ability to recruit new users. To add the new feature, it must be done through going onto your twitter settings and ticking the appropriate box.
Either way, say goodbye to the disappointment of opening Twitter and seeing nothing that takes your fancy.