The product team at Twitter is on a roll this week.
Adding to the mandatory #NewTwitter upgrade and image uploading, two new features were announced Wednesday aiming to better surface the personalized content and activity already on Twitter.
First up is the new @username timeline, shown at left. (For me, the tab will read @kerrronny. For you, it will read @ + your username.) This feed brings together all activity on Twitter related to your account. If someone favorites or retweets a tweet of yours, if someone tweets at you, if someone starts following you–these are all the best examples of activity you’ll see in the @username timeline.
Most of this content is already accessible, but you have to sort of jump around to find it all. In a way, the @username timeline is like your notifications list on Facebook, alerting you to all the activity directly associated with you.
The other new feature, shown at bottom, is yet another timeline, accessible under the Activity tab. This new timeline is kind of like the one described above, except it tracks all the people you follow instead of your own activity. See who started following who (and maybe follow them yourself), see tweets your followers are favoriting and retweeting and more.
Both of these new features aim to address the signal-to-noise problem on Twitter. That is, the noise is immense, and catching a sharp, valuable signal is rare.
Right now, dipping into your main timeline can seem a daunting, almost impossible task–you’ll never read every tweet unless you stay in the stream permanently. How do you check Twitter only occasionally but still manage to read a lot of significant content? The Activity tab and @username timeline could bring us closer to realizing that potential, but it doesn’t take us there yet.
Also this week, Twitter completely abandoned the old Twitter site design and gave all users the ability to upload photos with their tweets. These two updates, along with the two above, indicate that the Jack Dorsey-led product team is laser-focused on streamlining the Twitter experience for new and old users alike.
