You know that thing where Facebook determines for you what should appear on your News Feed? You only see certain posts from certain people on your News Feed, depending and how often you interact with them or, more importantly to Facebook, how much they pay to advertise on Facebook, if they’re a brand or business. Now, imagine a similar experience on your Twitter timeline. Yup, Twitter is reportedly experimenting with Facebook-esque News Feed algorithms (EdgeRank).
I don’t know about you guys but I feel like this continual Facebookification of Twitter is going way over the line. When Twitter launched tailored trends about 2 years ago, I didn’t hesitate to disable it immediately. Tailored trends gave a false impression of what is actually trending because it only showed you what it thought you were interested in. So for example, if you liked, tweeted a lot, or interacted with tweeps who tweet a lot about Tiwa Savage, you would see her trending a lot.
Should these new experiments with timeline algorithms find their way into the main service, it will drastically alter the Twitter experience for us “veterans” in much the same way. A lot of the good stuff we actually care about would be replaced with Twitter spam. Twitter will never be the same. The beauty of Twitter is in its raw and somewhat random discovery potential. I don’t need Twitter to decide for me what and what doesn’t appear on my timeline. I have the unfollow button and Twitter Lists for that. And I use them very well.
Quite understandably, these things power users like myself take for granted are like Greek to new users. Twitter needs these new users if it is going to impress investors. And I honestly can’t fault some of the new features they’ve been adding, or previously experimenting tot hat respect. Multiple photo upload and tagging, prominent web profiles, and even Twitter lists for dummies are all new additions we can live with, as long as they don’t get in the way of our traditional usage. But Twitter deciding for your what appears on your timeline might be going a bit too far.
Thankfully, for now it’s just an experiment. It may make its way to beta users at some point and not get included on the main update. I happen to be a beta user so I’ll be playing close attention to update notifications for now. I tend to ignore them after I glance through the uninspired change logs. Frequent Android updates are another rant for another day. However, should Twitter ever decide to go full-on with this feature, I can only hope there will be an easy opt-out option as is obtainable with tailored trends.
