Twitter recently rolled out a new feature
which allows users to have a quick glance at some of the tweets they may have
missed since their last login. The ‘While you were away’ feature essentially
shows the best tweets on top of your homepage when you open the app or the
website.
Now sites like The
Verge, Guardian and TechCrunch are
reporting that the feature is live for some. We are yet to see the
feature on any of our feeds.
‘While you were away’ focuses on giving the
user a recap of some of the tweets which they could have missed in a timeline
filled with hundreds of tweets. It is not clear on how Twitter chooses
these top tweets but it could be dependent on the number of retweets or
favourites it has received or the kind of engagement a tweet has seen from
other users.
“Every time you open the Twitter app, you’ll
see something great,” Twitter had said when it announced the
new feature in November. This feature is also similar to Facebook’s ‘Top
Stories’ feature which gives the user a recap of some of the major stories that
have taken place on a particular day.
Essentially this feature is Twitter’s way of
ensuring that users get a simplified sense of what were the key tweets,
discussions on the site, instead of getting inundated with a lot of irrelevant
stuff. For Twitter, this feature is a must-have given that the social media
site has seen user
engagement and growth fall in the last quarter. Whether it will
boost engagement remains to be seen and that can only be gauged once the global
roll-out takes place.
