Get ready for an even more cluttered Twitter timeline

Steven Loeb · October 17, 2014 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/39c3

Twitter says it will start adding in tweets from users that you aren't following

I feel like its been a long time since a Twitter timeline was just tweets from people that we follow (IWith sponsored tweets and suggestions and retweets, there's a whole bunch of content on there already that we didn't sign up for.

So what harm can a little more of that do, right?

This past summer, Twitter began running some experiments where it started showing tweets from on user timelines from other users that the person was not following. Not just retweets from followers,  but accounts that it felt that a specific user might want to follow. Like The Daily Show?  Here's a sample tweet from The Colbert Report, for example. 

And, apparently, people responded well to the test because now Twitter has announced that it is making the feature permanent.

"Testing indicated that most people enjoy seeing Tweets from accounts they may not follow, based on signals such as activity from accounts you do follow, the popularity of the Tweets, and how people in your network interact with them. These experiments now inform the timeline you see today," Trevor O’Brien, a member of Twitter’s product team, wrote.

Like I said above, this is definitley not the first time that Twitter has altered the timeline. For example, in November of last year it introduced custom curated timelines, which allowed users to choose the Tweets they wanted to include, put then in any order, name the timeline and then share it with their followers.

So why does Twitter keep doing these kinds of tests and experiments? The company also addressed that in its post on Thursday.

"One of our goals for experimentation is to continue improving your home timeline. After all, that’s the best way to keep up with everything happening in your world. Choosing who to follow is a great first step – in many cases, the best Tweets come from people you already know, or know of," said O’Brien.

"But there are times when you might miss out on Tweets we think you’d enjoy. To help you keep up with what’s happening, we’ve been testing ways to include these Tweets in your timeline — ones we think you’ll find interesting or entertaining."

Ultimately the goal here is to expand its core user base. Experiments like these are not really going to drive new users, though Twitter really needs those, but they might increase the amount of time, and the number of ways, that their current user base will interact with the site.

By showing its users all of the stuff that it think that they don't know about yet, Twitter is obviously hoping to see an increase in advertising dollars as well, right now pretty much its only source of revenue, even if it is trying to change that.

(Image source: independent.co.uk)

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What is Twitter?

Twitter is an online information network that allows anyone with an account to post 140 character messages, called tweets. It is free to sign up. Users then follow other accounts which they are interested in, and view the tweets of everyone they follow in their "timeline." Most Twitter accounts are public, where one does not need to approve a request to follow, or need to follow back. This makes Twitter a powerful "one to many" broadcast platform where individuals, companies or organizations can reach millions of followers with a single message. Twitter is accessible from Twitter.com, our mobile website, SMS, our mobile apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, our iPad application, or 3rd party clients built by outside developers using our API. Twitter accounts can also be private, where the owner must approve follower requests. 

Where did the idea for Twitter come from?

Twitter started as an internal project within the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, and engineer, had long been interested in status updates. Jack developed the idea, along with Biz Stone, and the first prototype was built in two weeks in March 2006 and launched publicly in August of 2006. The service grew popular very quickly and it soon made sense for Twitter to move outside of Odea. In May 2007, Twitter Inc was founded.

How is Twitter built?

Our engineering team works with a web application framework called Ruby on Rails. We all work on Apple computers except for testing purposes. 

We built Twitter using Ruby on Rails because it allows us to work quickly and easily--our team likes to deploy features and changes multiple times per day. Rails provides skeleton code frameworks so we don't have to re-invent the wheel every time we want to add something simple like a sign in form or a picture upload feature.

How do you make money from Twitter?

There are a few ways that Twitter makes money. We have licensing deals in place with Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft's Bing to give them access to the "firehose" - a stream of tweets so that they can more easily incorporate those tweets into their search results.

In Summer 2010, we launched our Promoted Tweets product. Promoted Tweets are a special kind of tweet which appear at the top of search results within Twitter.com, if a company has bid on that keyword. Unlike search results in search engines, Promoted Tweets are normal tweets from a business, so they are as interactive as any other tweet - you can @reply, favorite or retweet a Promoted Tweet. 

At the same time, we launched Promoted Trends, where companies can place a trend (clearly marked Promoted) within Twitter's Trending Topics. These are especially effective for upcoming launches, like a movie or album release.

Lastly, we started a Twitter account called @earlybird where we partner with other companies to provide users with a special, short-term deal. For example, we partnered with Virgin America for a special day of fares on Virginamerica.com that were only accessible through the link in the @earlybird tweet.

 

What's next for Twitter?

We continue to focus on building a product that provides value for users. 

We're building Twitter, Inc into a successful, revenue-generating company that attracts world-class talent with an inspiring culture and attitude towards doing business.