Twitter chief Elon Musk said over the weekend that Twitter has rolled out its new swipeable timeline option, which will make it easier for users to switch between the algorithm-defined main feed (which includes recommended tweets from people you don’t follow), and a chronological feed of just users that you follow in the app. Sound familiar?
In March last year, Twitter released a similar feature with an option to pin a swipeable feed of ‘Latest tweets’ after you tapped on the star icon in the top right of the app.
The new process is essentially the same, though Twitter’s renamed the feeds for ‘For You’ and ‘Following’, as opposed to ‘Home and ‘Latest Tweets’.
‘For you’ sounds awful familiar.
Jokes aside, the feature may be a more valuable option now than it was last year, because Twitter is currently throwing in in as many recommended updates as it can into user feeds, in a bid to get people to explore more of what the app has to offer, and keep them engaged for longer sessions.
Similar practices show this may be how TikTok has seen big success. The app shows you a constant stream of things that you might like, as opposed to making you follow any specific profiles necessarily. By learning what kind of posts you like, it gives you more of it, which gives it the advantage of highlighting more of the best content from across the app, and boosting engagement.
A problem with Twitter is that its algorithm is significantly less accurate, so you end up getting vague and tangentially related tweets, based on what people you follow have liked or followed, which is not a particularly engaging experience. But now, you would just swipe across to get rid of it.
The new swipeable feeds option is now available on iOS. No word on Android availability as yet.
