| This is very sad news. The #1 reason why I moved from Facebook to Twitter was that the latter service used straightforward algoritms for deciding what to show me. When I opened Twitter, I could be almost sure that the timeline would only contain posts from people I followed, arranged in chronological order. Of course, there were some exceptions. Firstly, they always had ads. I see how many people here get angry about it, but I think ads on such site is perfectly normal. After all, they have to make money somehow, right? Secondly, there were times when I saw "While you were away" box. This was the thing I found annoying from the beginning. How did Twitter infer that I was interested in these five posts more than in those five posts? It got worse over time. In fact, now this box shows up after a few hours of my absence, as if I am expected to check Twitter 10 times a day. And it appears that they are planning to take these features to a new level. I really hope they don't do everything they talk about, but if they do, maybe I will have to seek a new social media service. |
* Account I follow, 15s ago.
* PROMOTED post from 5 days ago. (here I've already run out of browser real estate on a 27" display because the tweets take so much damn room. Scroll down a page)
* While you were away: post from 3 days ago
* While you were away: post from 4h ago
* While you were away: post from 1 day ago
* While you were away: post from 3 days ago
* While you were away: post from 6h ago
* While you were away: retweet from 2 days ago
* While you were away: post from 1 day ago
* Actual twitter post from user I follow, 2h ago.
* PROMOTED from 18 days ago
For all intents and purposes, the Twitter feed is less chronological, less useful, and less content-dense than Facebook, and that's saying something considering that Twitter is supposedly a 140char service.
I had to scroll through 3 pages of crap before I got to the actual chronological twitter you speak of.
Also, they have this horrible habit of making tweets with a white background, then a tiny grey divider between tweets so it can be hard to tell at a glance when you've moved from one section of content to another -- much like when GMail went from colored message threading to all-monochrome.