Twitter's rumored algorithmic timeline switch
forbes.com
forbes.com
The point of the algorithm is to show the user the content he/she wanted to see in the first place but might not have had the patience to scroll for, or might have gotten fed up reading lower quality content and closed the app before reading.
An algorithmic feed will also help a lot with spam detection/prevention.
Not quite - certainly all value is user created, but saying that only certain users are valuable is just as bad. There are whole subgenres of people that don't fit those two categories like "weird twitter", activists, indie game devs, and novelty/parody accounts.
How do you monetise Tahrir Square? Should you?
It is more like a micro blogging platform with an integrated RSS Reader.
My tweets are my blogs entries limited to 140 characters.
Clicking on followers is the same as clicking on subscribe to another blog RSS.
When I view all my followers tweets, that timeline is exactly like me viewing all my subscribed RSS in an RSS reader, the only different is you see the content there and then rather than clicking a link to view the entire story.
Retweets is same as reblog button on a blog.
Reply to a tweet is same as making a comment to a blog post.
As for Facebook I don't have an FB account to know how it functions. I'm guessing if you think about it long enough it is close to being a blog too with more bells and whistles. Adding your family/friends is akin to subscribing to their feed is just like subscribing to RSS on a blog.
The relationship between human users and "pages" that don't represent a person is even stranger, given that "like" means "subscribe to this, but only a few percentage of subscribers will see posts unless the page owner pays us".
A non-linear timeline makes sense to me, as long as the linear one is also left as an option.
Generally it destroys the idea of twitter as a "conversation" and entrenches it as a pile of unrelated attention-seeking statements.
It seems the push by product teams to come up with algorithms to boost ad-sales is stronger than the common sense.
Guess it's time to log off, move on and actually go outside for a change.
Really? Maybe for journalists etc who follow very active places or very large numbers but I found following 100-150 moderately active users worked pretty well and haven't heard too many complaints from similar users, except in response to changes.
Of course users who make a couple of tens of tweets a month and don't follow brands or pay attention to ads are not very profitable for twitter, so its no surprise their needs are ignored.
I want to skim through all entries in a linear fashion ordered by date descending.
Now Twitter want to do the same, that FB did in 2012.
https://www.facebook.com/home.php?m2w&sk=h_chr
m2w forces it to display in desktop mode on my Nexus 5 and sk=h_chr forces the Newsfeed to display in chronological order.
Presumably Twitter's web page UI would allow for a similar manipulation.
I don't use the FB android app because it inserts ads between Newsfeed content, as does the mobile Web view. Viewing FB in desktop mode on my mobile allows me to zoom the middle column (the newsfeed) to the width of my screen, pushing the advert column to the right, off screen.
I would probably switch away from the twitter app if they made this change.
Until the end of 2011, you could read really all posts of your friends incl. all Farmville, etc posts. The automatics filtering and the automatic inclusion of certain "featured posts" of friends-of-friends and advertisement is what destroyed FB for me.
My issue with it has been even though it's chronological, it doesn't actually show you all the posts from all your friends. It still does it's own crappy algorithmic filter(I think it's based on interaction) and I miss stuff from people I want to hear from all the time. I only have about 60 friends and no one is relatively chatty so there's no reason why I should miss anything.
I use this bookmark too, but no, it doesn't. Posts are still "bumped" with comments and things are filtered. Can't stand it...
There's a good reason they listen to the data and not to the user complaints of a vocal minority.
There's a corollary to the network effect. Once a community reaches its ideal size and identity it keeps trying to grow and both the influx of more users and the attempt to chase more users ruins what made it unique and ideal.
I wonder whether this is potentially dangerous for them to do.
(Hrmmm, your note prompted me to find a Chrome plug-in that can do this for me automagically: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/incognito-filter/c...)
https://valve.github.io/fingerprintjs2/
Gives me the same fingerprint in my browser & incognito mode.
Even Facebook leaves Groups in peace. Keep the algos for mass-audience feeds.
An algorithmic timeline does not necessarily mean live events are out of order. There is no reason the algorithm cannot be sophisticated enough to detect time-sensitive tweets and preserve the ordering of real time events. In fact, a sophisticated enough algorithm would cluster real time event-related tweets in chronological batches, and surface relevant replies / commentary around it.
I'm pretty sure that almost all the people threatening to leave Twitter will still be there when the dust settles.
I didn't expect that Twitter would follow the path of the almighty blackbox algorithm.
[1] https://medium.com/@bendersej/scrolling-through-my-facebook-...
Jack isn't saying Twitter doesn't intend to use algorithmic timelines in the future.