While Facebook's newsfeed has gone though many tweaks and redesigns over the years, Twitter's feed has remained relatively unchanged throughout its eight-year history.
But recent comments from Twitter executives suggest that could be changing, and users aren't happy about it.
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In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Twitter CFO Anthony Noto made comments that many interpreted to mean the company may be considering making significant changes to how tweets are surfaced in users' main timelines.
“If you think about our search capabilities we have a great data set of topical information about topical tweets,” Noto said. This, he says, opens up the opportunity for “an algorithm that delivers the depth and breadth of the content we have on a specific topic and then eventually as it relates to people."
Twitter has always surfaced tweets in reverse chronological order. Though recent updates have made small tweaks to what people see in their feeds, users are accustomed to seeing their most recent tweets first, regardless of relevance or any other criteria. But this approach "isn’t the most relevant experience for a user,” Noto said. "Putting that content in front of the person at that moment in time is a way to organize that content better.”
Unsurprisingly, many users were not happy with the idea that their main timeline could be dramatically changing and immediately took to Twitter to vent.
If @twitter wants to offer a filtered feed as part of its service, fine, that’s totally cool. But this is killing *their only feature*.— Eric Sipple (@saalon) September 4, 2014
It's sad that @twitter has to tinker and maybe ruin the features we like just to show it's doing something. My feed is my feed for a reason.— Alex Konrad (@alexrkonrad) September 4, 2014
keep in mind the new filtered feed will only be bad if you don't want to pay twitter to feature your content. which, why wouldn't you— Digital Daniel (@BronzeHammer) September 4, 2014
My raw Twitter feed is now nothing but people talking about filtered Twitter feeds. I’m starting to think it might not be the worst idea.— Neetzan Zimmerman (@neetzan) September 4, 2014
Though Noto's latest remarks are by no means a confirmation these changes are indeed in Twitter's immediate pipeline, it would seem to be in line with previous comments from CEO Dick Costolo.
"We're not ruling out any kinds of changes," Costolo said earlier this year in an interview with AdWeek when asked about whether the social network would consider adopting Facebook-style algorithms.
But, saying he's not ready to rule the changes out is far from a confirmation the changes are actually coming, as Costolo later pointed out on Twitter, in response to people's interpretation of Noto's comments.
.@mathewi @om he never said a "filtered feed is coming whether you like it or not". Goodness, what an absurd synthesis of what was said.— dick costolo (@dickc) September 4, 2014
Though Twitter has never used algorithms the way other social networks like Facebook have, the company has been slowly making changes to what users see in their feeds. Most recently, the microblogging site began surfacing favorites, including those from accounts people aren't following, in users' timelines, causing mixed reactions.