Today, Twitter announced via their blog that they were going to launch "While you were away".
They say that when you come to twitter you will have missed some of your posts, so they will help you by posting those tweets that are most likely to have been of interest to you at the top of your news feed. This is very similar to what Facebook have done recently, where they arrange your news feed based on your behaviour with posts from your most favourite friends appearing first. Facebook's change was not popular with many users who dislike Facebook deciding who they should see posts from and advertisers too (as not all of your followers now see all of your posts).
I do hope that this Twitter announcement, does not mean that they lose the one thing that twitter has over their rivals - the absolute timeliness of the content. If that is lost, does Twitter lose its USP?
I applaud personalisation and the use of behavioural data. I am just not 100% sure if it is right for Twitter.
I have posted Twitter's blog post below:
Today we’re introducing something new to your home timeline: a recap of some of the top Tweets you might have missed from accounts you follow.
A lot can happen while you’re on the go. To fill in some of those gaps, we will surface a few of the best Tweets you probably wouldn’t have seen otherwise, determined by engagement and other factors. If you check in on Twitter now and then for a quick snapshot of what’s happening, you’ll see this recap more often; if you spend a lot of time on Twitter already, you’ll see it less.
Our goal is to help you keep up – or catch up – with your world, no matter how much time you spend on Twitter. With a few improvements to the home timeline we think we can do a better job of delivering on that promise without compromising the real time nature of Twitter.
Recaps, marked with a “While you were away” heading, will begin to appear for all Twitter for iOS users today, and on our Android app and twitter.com soon.
