Twitter's new timeline feature
blog.twitter.com
blog.twitter.com
Maybe I am not as heavy a Twitter user as other people here, but I hate how easily I can miss important tweets if I just don't check my feed for a few hours. Since I am also on a different time zone than many people I follow, I end up having to catch up on hours of tweets every morning by scrolling down the page for ages. Otherwise, I can easily miss extremely relevant/interesting things.
If this feature allows me to quickly get an overview over the most interesting tweets (and I can turn it off when I am following the feed more closely) that's great!
I personally really hate this kind of thing as it clutters up my feed, and it never gives anything I care about. The value of Twitter for me come from the reverse-chronological feed, not this kind of thing.
Twitter would be really really cool if you could have your lists and then swipe through them like you do with the "Moments" feature (which is awful)
I actually use Facebook the same way too.
Yeah, I'd probably like this. I follow a LOT of people (right at the limit of how many you can follow) and I never expect to read every tweet. I just expect to check Twitter every now and then, and find a few useful / interesting nuggets of news. And occasionally I do a #hashtag search if I want to catch up on a specific topic.
So, for me, this kind of feature makes a lot of sense, as long as the algorithm does a good job of picking out the "good stuff".
It may not be for everybody, but I can see this being valuable for at least some percentage of Twitter users.
I'm sure someone is going to tell me that I should unfollow more people, but that seems like a pretty crude and destructive method to try to increase the quality of my feed. I still want to see good quality tweets from the people who tweet a bit too much. I appreciate that use case (follow just a few accounts and read every tweet) though and definitely think they should cater to it.
It isn't crude or destructive at all because you will see those good quality tweets from people who are heavy users. You will see them when others who you still follow retweet the good ones. Your feed should be a solid mix of tweets you curated by following interesting people, and tweets those people curated for you by retweeting.
It can be a bit awkward to unfollow people you know because there is that social pressure to 'follow back' but this idea is worth it for the positive results.
To give a specific example, try unfollowing all local media outlets (newspaper, TV, radio) and instead follow one or two reporters whose feeds you find interesting. You will still see all the interesting local news and you avoid all the marketing and fluff that pollutes the media outlets' Twitter feeds.
I read every single Tweet in my feed every day and it only takes a few minutes. There is usually a ton of interesting and relevant stuff in there. I couldn't do this before, when I was following too many people.
I follow very few people I know in real life because they aren't interesting on Twitter. I don't feel bad about that — if you don't like what I tweet, you should unfollow me and we can still be real-life friends.
Mute them. It works well, and if they are engaged with others you follow it is all there, uncensored. So it isn't as harsh as a block, and they generally don't know about you putting it in place because you can still interact when your friends do, or when you choose.
Judging by the facebook algorithm, which is utterly terrible at showing important stuff, it seems unlikely. Just another step in the facebookification of twitter to appease short term oriented shareholders who rated the growth too highly.
It is already a mess, can't see how adding this will improve the situation. Opposite of the minimal, fast, realtime platform that so many flocked to in the first place. I'm close to deleting accounts for both.
Secondly, to achieve the current $296Bn market capitalisation, investors are rating the company at sixty-six times 2015 earnings. That means that FB better be growing at an obscene rate for the very long term, because as we say in the market, FB is "priced for perfection". Any hiccups in earnings or signs of faltering growth and investors will be just as quick to de-rate the FB price as they have been for TWTR. So it can be "worth" $296Bn one day and significantly less than that the next.
No one has ever bought a company whose market cap is as big as FB's currently is -- let alone bought one for cash. But publicly-traded companies with caps in the billions have been bought in all-cash transactions, and the experience there is that the buyer usually ends up paying more than the market cap right before the investing public starts to become aware of the attempt to buy the company. But even if that were not true, what relevance would it have for whether or not it is a good idea to use market-cap data to compare publicly-traded companies and their products and strategies?
Does market cap not remain a good estimate of the future expected earnings of the company?
The parent did not make a claim that comparing the market cap of TWTR to that of FB is useful, nor am I attempting to make an "argument" in the opposite direction. The goal was to point out that measuring success by an extremely volatile marginal price which rates the stock at sixty-six times earnings is neither accurate nor useful. A little surprised that my attempt to provide useful information earned a handful of downvotes compared to the parents throwaway sentence.
If one honestly believes that market cap data is useful for comparing publicly traded companies in anything but the broadest sense, then one must believe that yesterday TWTR was "worth" 2.5% more of FB than today (judging by daily fluctuations in the TWTR:FB ratio). That is observably not the case, the only difference between that day and the previous is that the company made some information public, no facts at the coalface actually changed. Value of equity is decided over the very long term life of that equity.
As for your final question, one need only look back in history to see that the aggregate marginal daily price and hence market capitalisation is often (and especially in tech) not a good estimate of future expected earnings of a company. The market almost always overshoots, both to the upside and downside, largely depending on available liquidity.
I just logged in to fb (Android app) for the first time today and was shown a post shared by a friend. I left a commmment and was shown a weird message "will be shown once online". Never seen it before, but no problem I just need to check my comment went through. Too bad! That shared post is no longer in my feed, even after dragging to refresh 3 or 4 times, each time showing completely different content, mostly stuff from previous days that I had already seen (but I still have to scroll for ages to check because what was on top might be down lower now). In the end I had to go to his fb page and check manually, because the algorithm that decided that post was important immediately changed its mind on my behalf.
PS: the comment now appears on some refreshes and not others.
For example, I really care about funny cats. My timeline is 85% cats, and I retweet funny cat pictures 65% of the time. However, the while you were away feature shows me things like opinions about voting, or holidays, or what co-workers are doing and saying, etc - Yah - it's in my feed, but I literally don't care. I spend 8 hours a day with my co-workers and hear all their tweets first hand. All I want are fun cat pictures from places that I haven't seen before to make the day easier to pass and to ward off depression... and it'd be great if twitter can make me a cat picture search engine. But for now they haven't done that for me yet.
Maybe they can allow a user to curate the "while you are away" algorithm so I can have a core set of twitter accounts that I really want to keep track of while I'm away ( https://twitter.com/cuteemergency and https://twitter.com/EmrgencyKittens ) and/or weigh explicitly which accounts I want to train my personal preference algorithms ... It would be pretty easy too since the lists feature already exists - just make it so the algorithm only pulls from an indicated list.
Until such a function exists I think i'll keep it off and just enjoy the cats.
Anecdotal, but I can see how this feature might or might not hit the target. All I can say is I hope they keep it an option that can be disabled or enabled and they don't take away the option box for this.
Mute them on Twitter if the unfollowing isn't socially acceptable?
I just don't need to be reminded about what they did "while I'm away" - by definition when I'm away from Twitter I'm most likely working and talking to them directly! And often I helped them write/make/instigate the tweet that is getting so much traffic that twitter emerges it as "something hot" from their account.
I get that I want to follow them and don't want to mute them - just that the feature is extraneous for some types of tweets (and some classes of twitter accounts) - for example, if I follow a stock tweet - one that tweets pricing alerts for example, I don't need to know 10+ hours later "what important things they are up to" because by definition, that stock tweet is no longer valid (trading day is only the length of the working day).
And even if I wanted historical updates, I can just go back to their timeline and/or do a search on the stock exchange symbol.
Like I said, if they allowed users to filter out or filter in - or use the List feature - which a large % of twitter users know about and use, it'd be more useful.
The "While You Were Away" view has been really frustrating to me, because I follow thousands of people and appreciate a summary, but if I accidentally click off it to Mentions I can't get it back. The Discover tab was great because I could click on it whenever I wanted.
We (Twitter users) are not as much worried about our stream being polluted, as much as OUR tweets not being seen. Currently, as long as people are online, there's a certain guarantee that they will see it. You don't need to reach out for popularity, because they'll see it anyway. Once it becomes an algorithmically-defined popularity contest, it gets very similar to Facebook, something that most of die-hard twitter fans don't want this to be.
Yes, we think the 'algorithmic' feed is going to suck in terms of our streams, but also that our tweets will get lost in all the celebrity noise. Twitter reallllyyy doesn't seem to get that aspect of the complaints. This is more of a celeb-pandering move than to improve user experience.
So by giving my followers the option only see popularly selected tweets, you're already shutting them off me. Yeah, they may not always like my tweets, but they would like to see them once in a while (as I will want them to).
To summarize: We (existing twitter users) had a contract, an expectation-- that our timelines were going to be chronological, and we would see everything. Twitter is trying to change that, and changing our expectations WHILE we are using it. My guess is, it thinks the 'network effect' makes it too big to fail, and doing this will bring in more of the fb-crowd. By doing this, it is alienating us those who were here for precisely 'not-like-fb' features.
I am mad. Very mad. If this is made the default, this is going to be another 'google-killed-reader' rage.
And to be honest, the kind of user you describe in your post sounds like someone I wouldn't want to follow in the first place. The signal to noise ratio would just be too low. At least with this new algorithm I might follow them and catch the occasional popular tweet from them.
Currently, if your followers scroll through all their tweets, they are guaranteed to see everything you post. The same is true with the new system, as it's described in the blog post, although they might see some other tweets before yours, if the algorithm decides to prioritise them. Perhaps Twitter will later introduce a more Facebook-like system where users have "the option to only see popularly selected tweets", but that's not what they're currently proposing.
It will be — the announcement says so. “Then we'll be turning on the feature for you in coming weeks — look out for a notification in your timeline.” (Emphasis mine. Delightful euphemism.)
No mention if this applies to lists.
Right after that they said "If you don't, send your thoughts our way, and you can easily turn it off in settings."
In my experience, as someone who follows a bunch of people but rarely tweets, this is wrong--at least for me.
When I'm online I usually scroll past a bunch of tweets without reading. There are certain accounts I know are noisy, and I just scan the engagement numbers to see which tweets are worth looking at.
Why do I do this? Because Twitter puts all the tweets in my feed. So to find the good stuff, I have to filter at high speed.
Often what I end up valuing, I find after the fact. It works like this--someone posts a great tweet. Over the next x hours, a bunch of other people reply, RT, MT, or quote tweet it. The original poster retweets some of those. I see that retweet. Now, to get the context, I need to do a bit of hunting to find the original tweet. My feeling is, well, maybe software could do that hunting for me.
I understand your concern, but this seems to contradict reality... According to this article, only a small percentage of your followers actually see your Tweets: http://marketingland.com/facebook-twitter-impressions-90878
The second type of twitter users, like myself, follow a short list of people, and we actively curate this list so that we can read all the tweets in our timeline. I have just realized that it is in Twitter's best interest if everyone was in the first group - which is likely the majority of users.
https://web.archive.org/web/20090218122324/http://twitterisn...
The thing is I do not trust an algorithm (or popularity) to accurately tag what an "important" tweet is to me. So I tend to follow single-purpose accounts with high signal to noise ratio - if I follow you for your insights in algorithms; serial-tweeting your cat pics will get lead me to unfollow you. I know I miss out on a lot of C.Sci wisdom from people who tweet prodigiously, which is a shame
I wish twitter had user-defined 'channels' like @user/cuda and @user/cats so I can selectively follow a specific channel that interests me...
I follow relatively few people because of the firehose effect. My attitude towards the people I follow is that I like seeing their tweets, but I don't really care if I miss them. News would be a good example of this. It's great to get news or sports tweets in the moment, but they're probably not tweets I'm going to go back through later to find out what happened.
On the other hand, I have a number of lists, whose members I do not follow, but whose members tweets I do want to see. I probably spend more time in these lists than I do on my timeline. The lists are for specific types of information ("must reads", "python", "humor"). The more focused (fewer people in) the list, the more I value not missing the tweets.
The twitter app makes lists very inconvenient to get to, which is too bad. I like the moments feature, but wind up using Tweetbot (or another alternative app) because I want easy access to my lists.
There's too much self managing and noise right now with Twitter. I pretty much have to have a separate account in order to efficiently dive into the different networks.
Let me give two use cases.
Say there's a basketball player and he tweets another basketball player and as a user it's fun to retweet/share/follow these conversations.
Then let's say I'm also into indie games and this one indie developer tweets a sneak peek to a new release, and some game blogger talks about it. As a user, again, it's fun to retweet/share/follow this.
I can't easily do this. Content is slapped together in a shitty form of lists and I continue to miss important things and I get jealous of other people's serendipitous luck in enjoying these conversations I would love to be a part of.
If Twitter can figure this out, they would do well.
To do better, I think twitter should look at how Sina Weibo does it. Weibo started out as a complete rip-off, but wound up coming up with some very useful ideas before zombie accounts and government censorship ran it all into the ground.
I think social media lists are one of those ideas that seems great in theory, but whose value is dynamically unstable in real life.
Lists are only valuable if they are well-maintained. But maintainence takes time and attention, which are not always available. And once lists start to be compromised, even a little, then it will take even more time and attention to fix them. Which makes it even more unlikely they'll be fixed.
Obviously lists work for you, but it seems like they don't for most folks.
What was Gmail's original value proposition? You never have to worry about deleting or filing emails anymore, because you get a ton of space and really good search.
I know a lot of people do carefully file their emails, but Gmail shipped without folders at all and they've done well with that model.
Automated, curated lists are great. Manual ones (e.g. folders) just add more for me to do.
I agree with you, and think your examples from fb and G+ are compelling. Anything that adds entropy for the user is a hard-if-not-impossible sell. In reflecting on all this, I realized I like lists because they make twitter useful. News feeds, by contrast, make social media entertaining. So: where do the twain meet? I'd suggest two models: "smart" lists and curated lists.
A real world example of smart lists would be feedly. When I add an RSS feed to my account, feedly suggests a category for it. I'd say the suggested categories are accurate 80%+ of the time. If twitter were to implement this so when you follow someone twitter automatically suggests a list you could add the person to, it would both benefit the follower (I have topic-based lists I can look at, and I didn't have to do anything!) and the person being followed (hey, I got a new follower!).
Curated lists could be straight up useful (list-lover that I am, I subscribe to some other users' lists). With the advent of Moments, it's clear twitter is open to curation; how about encouraging individual to provide curated lists?
I don't think that twitter will go the way of focusing on lists, but I think there could be significant value in simply making lists a bit more prominent.
- If you want it, you can have it.
- If you don't, you aren't forced to.
- It's opt-in
This will probably be pilloried — as it appears to already be here — since I suspect the #RIPTwitter damage is already done, but this does sound like a reasonable compromise. New feature that might get more people using and engaging in the system but won't change anything for people who don't want it. How is this not a win-win?
Am I the only one who can't find timeline section in settings?
I think it might make sense when I look at some of the trending things though. Then they really need to apply filters, especially to the spammers.
So every time I tell it "I hate this", it thinks I actually dislike the people and tweets, which is actually the opposite.
Which begs the question of what they're doing with the data.
The mind boggles.
On the official android client, you can dismiss the second popup without clicking on "I like this" or "I hate this" by clicking anywhere on the screen. I'm not going to train your stupid robot for your stupid feature.
If I see a "you may have missed..." tweet that was sent an hour ago, if I scroll down to that point in my time line, it's not there.
All I want is a fucking RSS feed of tweets, tbh, organized by date. Nothing more, nothing less. Go ahead and cram it full of ads, like they've already done - just don't try to fucking sort it for me.
I had not noticed that! I always dismiss the "you may have missed" without reading, it's quite insidious. It's time I changed clients
"The Verge spoke to two users who have been testing the new timeline for a few months. Neither particularly liked it. "I started to get used to it but I still think that it is a terrible idea," Twitter user Robin Bonny told me. "It tears conversations apart, and it's really confusing when some people have been live-tweeting an event and those things get scattered all across my timeline. It makes it extremely hard to follow events, and destroys one of the core values of Twitter, in my opinion." Another user, Coady DiBiase, was only slightly more positive. "It's definitely nice in terms of catching up on things I might've missed, but it's a departure from the core idea of Twitter, so overall it complicates things.""
http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/6/10927874/twitter-algorithmi...
Its social media micro transactions. 95% of people would never use it, but that 5% might use it a lot. But you have to make it transparent. You should only push it to people who actively use it. If it gets pushed for every Tweet, it will only highlight the system, which will destroy it.
They won't, they don't want user's pennies. It's hyper growth or bust.
To Twitter's shareholders, yes it is. You can make that much with just a few large marketing deals, that's their end game.
I really don't like this trend. The same thing happened with facebook with notifications. They looked at the data and figured that when people have notifications they tend to open the app more. Then started to send tens of unwanted notifications every day. (Which comes from eg. groups that I never joined, or games etc.) Result: hard blocking notifications from the mobile OS level.
I hope twitter doesn't follow the same path. (Actually they already do this at some level with 'your friend x & y liked tweet z' notifications)
These retention things just kill the apps that I already love. But since the trend is this way, it is probably working out for majority of people and not for me.
For me the result was uninstalling Facebook. The app was showing daily notifications for people it thinks I could follow, with no options to disable the feature.
This was fixed at some point, so I guess the user feedback got through.
Interestingly enough one of their 5 things this quarter is going to be "improved developer support". I wonder how they'll balance this with third-party Twitter clients that intentionally filter out official marketing efforts.
"We never planned to reorder timelines next week."
I guess you could argue that the timeline isn't "reordered" since the top tweets will still be in reverse chronological order and then whatever comes afterwards will also be in chronological order, but that's still some seriously weasely language.
I guess that just goes to show how effective Twitter is as a medium for expressing complex ideas...
It's entirely open source, has a twitter-like frontend you can install, and is federated across instances so even if one node starts with changes you don't like you can switch to another one and still talk to the entire network. quitter.se is moderated against hatespeech and nsfw...but other instances aren't, with ones like freezepeach.xyz being explicitally for freedom of speech. And you can talk to anyone on any instance from anywhere.
Nice start.
The entire TOS is a marvel of blackwhite-style thinking.
Because "users who harass others" and "racism, sexism, ableism, homo- and transphobia" are "in practice limitations of free speech," we get the following, quite remarkable policy:
"Moderators can exclude users from appearing in the public timeline it at any moment, without warning, permanently or temporarily. Consider it a privilege to be published in the public timeline, not a right."
Wow! Such free speech!
Within a platform (such as twitter or quitter), the platform-runner is analogous to the government. The TOS (analogous to laws in a traditional government) can choose to value free-speech, or not.
What chafes me is the Orwellian language. To avoid "limitations of free speech," moderators can "exclude user's at any moment...without warning." Unless you're at a pretty advanced doublethink level, that is certainly not a free-speech-enhancing policy.
It would be more honest and less scary if proponents of such policies simply admitted they were prioritizing other goals.
In fact, I like this approach regardless of the tone the mods at quitter take since it means I can spin up my own instance and block their crap from my public feed if I'm not interested in Stalinist/Maoist hero worship. :)
GNU Social is free speech. It is federated across servers. No one of the instances can ban you from the network completely.
quitter.se /is not unmoderated and does not advertise as such/. It is one instance in the GNU Social network. It can ban you for posting hatespeech, and the owner (and the nonprofit company that it's under) has no obligation to host people's vitriol if he doesn't want to.
I'm not going to try and defend quitter.se's terms of service because I don't believe in them /nor are they relevant to the network on a whole/. Take it up with @hannes2peer@quitter.se, but there's really no reason to when you can host your own instance and just pretend his censorship doesn't happen.
It's more analogous to email than twitter: you can post to other email servers. People from other email servers can post to you. But your email server is free to kick you off or blacklist all emails from another one if it wants to, while you can move to any other server if your host is being abusive.
> Under Content, look for Timeline and toggle the box next to Show me the best Tweets first to change the setting.
There are 4 subsections under Content for me: Country, Tweet media, Video Tweets, and Your Twitter archive.
Edit: (U.S.)
I don't really understand why Twitter doesn't simply re-use an already working mechanism (lists) that they have neglected for quite a while. Maybe they could autofill a list with suggestions ("important people" or something) and present that as an alternative timeline.
I guess what I want is when someone subtweets, to have a link to the tweet it's subtweeting about. Twitter's website is a functional mess and having to scroll timelines for context is a huge time sink.
I am pretty sure a lot of twitter power users would freak out over this kind of feature. One that integrates something similar to moments, but within the context of your timeline.
But twitter is a global product so when I wake up in the morning in the USA and see something like that apology tweet. I don't want to have to dig to figure out what's going on.
The strength of Twitter is that the timeline is always current whenever I bring it up, and I can follow back in time clearly as I scroll through.
Messing with that is a huge mistake.
But the one time I accidentally click on promote a tweet, I get ads for twitter in my stream and a followup email.
I could even see a Moments section that is fed off people you follow.
If that's true don't expect it to be hidden behind a setting for long.
That's perfect, I need to flip it on, just how things like this should be added to anything!
Should work well for most users if executed right.
I really don't have much of an opinion about the Twitter feature, but if a new feature appears in an app that is going to be beneficial to most users, making it off by default guarantees the vast majority of users will never see it.
Good point. I suppose if I'm looking at it as a user I want to be able to turn on new things myself. If I'm looking at it as a creator/developer I want people to use this new awesome thing I spent all this time and money creating that I think will improve things for them.
Edit: Either i'm blind, or that setting isn't available everywhere yet.
So having that selection of tweets in the UI is a good idea, I think.