Twitter Updates Algorithm While Introducing New Facebook Like Timeline


Twitter recently updated its algorithm and will completely change the way users use Twitter. The new updates to Twitter include a Facebook Like Timeline, reordering of tweets, and bad memories of how Facebook selectively shows posts.

Heavy reported that one of the most important changes to the algorithm is that it changes the chronological order of tweets and how they are displayed. The timeline will now display tweets based on the algorithm instead of displaying them in chronological order the way users love them.

As early as 2014, Twitter’s CFO said that the reverse chronological order wasn’t the most relevant user experience. Timely tweets often ended up buried at the end of users’ Twitter feeds and unless users were constantly monitoring their feeds, they might miss important updates.

Twitter experimented with the new approach as early as 2014 by providing “Game Timelines” for those who watched NFL football. Instead of showing all the tweets for a particular hashtag, Twitter curated the most relevant tweets that highlighted the best content.

As previously reported in The Inquisitr, social media marketing will play an important part in online marketing in 2016. Hootsuite Founder Ryan Holmes listed his most important social media trends for 2016 and introduced a compliance guide for financial services that all marketers may benefit from using because it can help marketers create more effective social media marketing campaigns.

Holmes’ Hootsuite social media marketing tool offers users a way to effectively manage their internet marketing campaigns including Twitter. Tools like Hootsuite also include a major tie in to another online marketing trend that will be hot in 2016, and that’s mobile marketing.

One of the new possibilities the Twitter algorithm may offer is the ability to opt-in to the new timeline instead of receiving the timeline by default. It is unclear at this time whether Twitter will offer this feature as the new timeline won’t be released for at least another week.

Many Twitter users are angry about the new changes and have voiced their displeasure on the microblogging site. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who took over in October 2015, announced multiple changes to the site including increasing the number of characters from 140 to 10,000. Users flooded the site with tweets and photos about the new changes. The question being posed is will the new algorithm filter out these types of tweets?

Mashable reported that Twitter had been experimenting with the order of tweets for some time. Former product chief Kevin Weil hinted back in November 2015 at a conference about such a change in switching from the reverse chronological order of tweets to the use of an algorithm to determine the order.

“Great product teams are always challenging their own beliefs… changing away from purely reverse chronological timeline to a world where we try and show you the most interesting and most relevant, most important thing that’s happening in your world the moment you open Twitter — that’s an example of questioning your core beliefs.”

One of the complaints that users had was that when Facebook initially introduced its timeline changes, they rolled it out as an option and not by default. Facebook has since changed the policy and site users now receive the new timeline by default. This change has led to users not always seeing relevant updates they are interested in.

Although a Twitter spokesperson previously declined to comment on the report released on Friday, Twitter executives have been considering tweaking the timeline for sometime now. Currently, it is unclear how broadly Twitter will roll out the new timeline feature.

[Photo by Pixabay]

Share this article: Twitter Updates Algorithm While Introducing New Facebook Like Timeline
More from Inquisitr