Twitter Updates Its Timeline to Show "Best Tweets" First
Chronology takes a backseat to relevancy.
Twitter has finally updated its timeline design, featuring tweets that are sorted based on relevancy to individual users, as opposed to the reverse-chronological order that users are familiar with. The update is rolling out across Twitter’s apps and browser clients now; users can choose to manually opt in or out of the feature in their account settings.
The new timeline will open with a selection of up to a dozen of the “best tweets” for the user determined by an as-yet unexplained algorithm. Refreshing one’s timeline will remove the best-of selection and the timeline returns to its familiar form. The ‘While You Were Away’ feature survives, but will only show tweets that have occurred while the user has taken a break from perusing the timeline; the Best-Of tweets are organized based on their recency, as well as quality.
We can already see the Best-Of function benefitting advertisers who will pay for placement to benefit promotions and native advertising campaigns. At this rate, it’s only a matter of time before your timeline is a wall of 10,000-character rants.
