Twitter tinkers with time
Twitter's timeline is getting a makeover. Not content with presenting tweets in an ordered, chronological fashion (well, reverse-chronological if you want to be pedantic), Twitter is experimenting with the order which tweets are displayed.
It's something that Facebook has been doing for a while, but now Twitter has jumped on the bandwagon using new methods to "surface the best content" for users. At the moment, this is just an experiment, but it's entirely possible that the re-ordering will become the norm in the not-too-distant future. So what's the deal?
In an email to Vice, a spokesperson for Twitter confirmed the move, saying it is running "an experiment. We're continuing to explore ways to surface the best content for people using Twitter". Many would argue that the very point of Twitter is its potential to keep people up to date with instant, timely information. On the face of it, changing the chronology of the timeline flies in the face of this, but there are also potential benefits.
Twitter has already experimented with the "While You Were Away" feature, and in many ways the timeline re-ordering is something of an extension of this idea. It's not something that will be to everyone's taste, but it does open up the possibility of grouping together related tweets outside of the confines of hashtags and trending topics.
What's your preference when it comes to consuming social media? Would you like to see things in the order in which they happened, or would you rather a more 'curated' option.
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