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)
