Earlier this year, when Twitter released its quarterly financial results, CEO Dick Costolo was asked whether the platform would ever implement a Facebook-style filtering algorithm, he hedged his answer by saying he wouldn’t “rule it out.” According to some recent comments from chief financial officer Anthony Noto, however, the company is doing a lot more than not ruling it out — it sounds like a done deal. And while that might help improve engagement with new users, it could increase the dissatisfaction some older users feel with the service.
At a financial conference on Wednesday in New York, the CFO provided some hints about the feature roadmap that new head of product Daniel Graf — who came to Twitter from Google in April — has in mind for the service, a list that includes better search and a move into group chat. But he also suggested that the traditional reverse-chronological user stream could become a thing of the past, as the company tries to improve its relevance. As the Wall Street Journal put it:
Twitter’s timeline is organized in reverse chronological order… but this “isn’t the most relevant experience for a user,” Noto said. Timely tweets can get buried at the bottom of the feed if the user doesn’t have the app open, for example. “Putting that content in front of the person at that moment in time is a way to organize that content better.”
An unfiltered stream is a core feature
This might seem like a small thing, similar to Twitter’s move to insert tweets that other people have favorited into a user’s stream if there aren’t any recent tweets to show them. But as the controversy over that feature shows, the Twitter chronological-order model is at the core of what the service offers for many users — and a number of them have specifically said it is the thing they like most about Twitter when compared to Facebook.
The most recent example of how stark the differences can be between a filtered feed and an unfiltered one was the unrest in Ferguson, Mo. and how that showed up so dramatically on Twitter but was barely present for most users of Facebook. As sociologist Zeynep Tufekci noted, that kind of filtering has social consequences — and journalism professor Emily Bell pointed out that doing this makes Facebook and Twitter into information gatekeepers in much the same way newspapers used to be.
The impetus for Twitter to filter is obvious: the service needs to show growth in both number of users and engagement in order to satisfy investors, and finding relevant content as a new user can be a challenge, which is why the company recently updated its so-called “on-boarding” process.
The reverse-chronological feed has already been tampered with by features like Twitter’s conversation threading, which connects responses in an attempt to show users an entire discussion — another feature that some users love and others hate. But moving to a totally filtered “relevance” approach would be a much more significant move, even if Twitter provided an opt-out or allowed users to turn it off. And it could change the nature of the service dramatically.
How about a sidebar option where people can click for “algorithm feed” or “stream feed”?
(Fingers-to-temple-pull-back-while-spreading-fingers-hand-opening motion)
Facebook offers both. Twitter could probably to the same and try to cater to both users who continuously snake and want chronological and users who connects once a day and would prefer a digest. No?
I expect they will do that — but will they keep reverting to the filtered feed and forcing you to manually change back, the way Facebook does? Research shows a lot of users don’t even know that Facebook filters their feed at all.
Isn’t Recent still filtered in some way? Like, you’re not seeing everything?
When I click “Most Recent,” it still shows me things from several days ago. Who knew my FB friends were so boring! Oh, they’re not.
Yes. Pages (as opposed to personal accounts) have to pay for the privilege of reaching everyone all the time.
As opposed to personal accounts, which reach some two to three percent of friends and followers and never more than that.
It’s interesting watching Twitter follow Facebook down the sewer drain.
I had no idea my FB was filtered. But at least now I know why I find it so damn boring. Too bad they seem to want to make Twitter boring as well.
Trouble with facebook is even the “chronological” stream is filtered. You still don’t see some things your friends post.
I do hope that twitter keeps the completely unfiltered feed option, but I don’t find that option to the be the case in Facebook, everyday I change it to most recent and it’s still filtered content, not everything that everyone that I like or pages that I like have posted. I’ve only tested this by looking at the times and looking at individual pages and seeing that they have posts that I am not being shown in that time frame on my most recent feed. It’s funny, too, because I just took a Twitter ad seminar that Twitter offered and their first selling point of Twitter was that they don’t filter their feeds “like Facebook does”
No it doesn’t – even when you switch on the chronological features on Facebook massive chunks of stuff still doesn’t appear
Facebook has an option to manually switch to a filtered, pseudo-chronological view, that goes back to Most Useless Garbage (aka “Top Stories”) mode when your session expires.
As long as third-party apps aren’t affected I don’t care. If they ARE affected, I’ll break his neck
Facebook stinks. Facebook obfuscates information under the guise of “helping” users find things–yeah, the things Facebook sees fit to provide. That’s not a model that engages me.
*I* decide what I want. If you can’t provide that, I’ll find an outfit that will, or maybe I’ll provide it myself. Competition is a great thing!
Now’s the time to do it. People will be leaving Twitter in droves.
Amazon network?? Can do…
Every site that provides advertisements based on a profile of you is going to want to filter results; it’s a basic money making feature. That’s why I use DuckDuckGo instead of Google. I can look up opinions and views different from my own to better understand those I disagree with, or at the very least make sure my search results aren’t just showing me what they think I want to see.
The moment Twitter starts “enhancing” my feed, then it is prone to be gamed.
Right now, Twitter is immune to optimization strategies, because Arthur Newbie has just as much a chance to be at the top of my list as Robert Scoble or Guy Kawasaki.
If “relevance” starts getting baked into the system, then you can expect the marketers to sweeten the formula any way they can: buying followers will actually have a benefit; botnet clicks will expand the reach of those who can pay; and the spirit of real meritocracy will vaporize with the elimination of the chronological equalizer.
Gross.
As long as it’s not like FB’s Top stories. A feature which prevents you from seeing anything new and relevant being posted by your friends. As well as being entirely pointless. Sorry, FB, but a lame joke from 17 hours ago is not a top story to me. Especially having seen it 2 minutes after it was originally posted.
This also sounds like a great way to force spoilers onto people. On twitter, and an east Coaster tweets who the killer is, and now I know. before even watch the show. Twitter will have to start banning users who tweet spoilers prior to 24 hours after a show airs, then.
And an op out better work better than FB’s switch to most recent, as they always resets to the useless top stories option. Thankfully, I found an extention for Firefox that keeps Top Stories shut off for good.
Thanks Kevin never thought to look for a FireFox app for this, hopefully it will work for me, one wasn’t available because it couldn’t be installed on version 31.0, but I tried the other I could find.
This is the problem of investors. You need them for their money, but then they get a say in things, and they have no idea what they’re doing. And they demand a greater return, causing you to make stupid choices that cost you money and alienate your clients..
What I would really like would be for twitter to start the feed at the last message I saw last time I was on, and then let me scroll up until I’m up to date.
A very old version of TweetDeck used to do exactly that.
My Android version does just that, although I usually just go to the top of the feed and read it from the top down anyway.
I only recently joined Twitter because I have come to hate Facebook with a passion and stopped using it months ago. Looks like I’ll be saying bye-bye to twitter too if they follow through with this.
How about I just delete my Twitter. I come to Twitter to use it like it is. I follow a few set of people. So I don’t have to “worry I will miss a post”. I don’t need ads and the same post at the top over and over, trying to tell me what I should be reading. That is some serious big brother bull right there.
To me “Filtered content” is minor censorship. I can think for myself & I sure don’t need investors or advertisers telling me what i should view or HOW I should view it. If they want to know more about us users & how to improve twitter it’s called READING tweets & complaints NOT stock market analysis tickers. #ListenToTheUsers
Dear Twitter, I want the freedom to see everything. I quit using facebook because I could no longer see everything.
Just no, Twitter!
If you have thousands of followers, that feed is just noise. Everybody’s tweeting, nobody’s reading. I’m still trying to find the value in twitter.
Your twitter feed is not what your thousands of followers tweet, it’s what the people you follow tweet. Following is not reciprocal. The beauty of twitter is that it’s a highly curated stream. If you’re following 1000s of people then you’re doing it wrong.
I am assuming you mean following thousands of people. People following you don’t affect your feed.
The easy way to fix this is simply to not follow everyone you see, and only follow people you want to read tweets from.
That’s your own fault for not curating your own timeline, not Twitter’s.
Death of Twitter as we know it? Maybe.
Fine by me, because all I really care about is Lindsey Lohan’s latest escapades, which I’m sure to get from a filter feeder. Sigh.
maybe they will make it as complicated as google so no one uses it.
maybe they will make it as complicated as google + so no one uses it.
Funny, I probably would have missed this article if my Twitter timeline was curated.
Twitter should be careful with any changes that might affect its ability to relay breaking news, which is currently one of its best value propositions, and a key differentiator from Facebook.
An algorithm needs a certain amount of data to accumulate before it can recognize that something new is important. My reverse-chronological feed is pretty amazing at surfacing news before it shows up as “trending”.
Well facebook gives you the option of top stories or recent stories, but forces the top stories into you feed no matter what you choose!
This is definitely a step down from what Twitter used to be. The conversation links were bad enough, but filtered feeds? — I might as well stop following people. And if that is the case, what’s the point using Twitter at all?
It depends how Twitter implement this. If they start supressing tweets like Facebook do, and fill your timeline with celebrity nonsense and stupid memes, they’ll get all the backlash they deserve.
If all they do is tweak the sequence of tweets for users who haven’t logged in for several hours and days so multiply-favourited or retweeted content is pushed higher up the stream, and they leave third-party apps alone, it may work.
I abandoned the Twitter web client in favour of Tweetdeck once inline images came in.
Not sure why Twitter wants to turn itself into Facebook. Facebook sucks. I deleted my account there. Looks like I’ll be deleting my Twitter account, too.
If anyone with some intelligence and understanding of why we liked Twitter in the past decides to start up a version of Twitter like it used to be (when it was useful and efficient) let us know. We’ll be there.
What a social media nightmare for those who use Twitter as a communication and information gathering channel for #SMEM. This is a terrible idea and counter to the way that Twitter has evolved. Why do they feel they need to mess with the pure information that bubbles up? If I want a Facebook type stream, I’ll look at Facebook. I wish Twitter was true to itself.
Be nice if they offered it as an option, like so: [A] Click here for the Classic Twitter you know and love. [B] Click here for the mucked-up dog’s breakfast ruined curated Twitter nobody asked for and nobody wants.
This is the problem with going public, you have the CFO driving product decisions. Somebody will launch an original twitter copycat immediately after they do this, to some success.
Twitter can bite me. I’m an adult and perfectly capable of deciding who I want to follow, thanks. Unless I missed something and Twitter gave birth to me, they’re not my mommy and they have no say in what I get to see, so they need to butt out.
App.net and identica need to do some serious advertising right about… now.
What a bunch of BS
What Twitter might do is offering you both the filtered and the unfiltered stream. The ‘discovery’ tab in the Twitter app is a mess and this filter stream would be good place to put it.
I have to admit i’m totally biased here! My company current.ly offers a filtered stream, containing the most important subjects (trends) and most important tweets.
This comes off as “helicopter parenting” to me. Does Twitter need to chase after us with our discarded laundry, clean it for us, and make sure it gets back into our bureaus?
And thus Twitter self destructs, not in an obvious way, but in a way that the people who made Twitter relevant will leave and find a social network that gets why they joined Twitter in the first place. Letting the marketing analysis guys run the show gets you the New Coke result each & every time. No one in business ever, and I mean NEVER learns this when they know share holders only listen to statistics and not the users/consumers needs and wants from the product they invest time in.
My Facebook friends ALL use Facebook less often because they never see their friends posts due to the insanely useless feed algorithm. So to the shareholders of Twitter, do you really think algorithms that actively cause users to interact LESS with your product is a win for you, do you really? And as has been mentioned in other replies here, Filtered = Censored or is Twitter not aware of it’s place in historic Political events of the past few years, dictatorships seemed very keen to curb Twitters availability I’d market the Sh#t out of that if my brand was seen as a tool of democracy around the world but I’m a human not an algorithm so I must be wrong?
“Anthony Noto suggested that the service will offer algorithm-driven curation of feeds much like Facebook does, in order to try and improve the relevance for users” – REALLY ?? Straight off the bat, you can smell the idiocy in action. Do honestly think people are that stupid or are really just phoning it in ??? relevance for users?, its relevance for ADVERTISERS and the end financial goals of Twitter! Pure and simple. Stop trying to patronize users and just come out and say it. Leave the bullshit excuses to the politicians.
On desktop I consume nearly all my news on Twitter through lists. So if they apply it to the timeline only, not so bad. For mobile, I generally scan my timeline and the occasional list for big stories like ferguson, Gaza, CAR etc. So that experience would be damaged.
noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
To circumnavigate this, surely you could just push everyone you follow onto a list and then only view the list feed?
I mean, it’s crap and faffy but there’s a way out doing this, isn’t there?