BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

Twitter Says People Like Seeing Tweets They Didn't Ask For

This article is more than 9 years old.

Bad news for everyone who was freaking out about Twitter's recent experiments with algorithmic timeline curation: The experiment was a success.

Twitter has disclosed that users responded positively to a test in which they were shown content in their timelines other than tweets from accounts they were following:

[T]here are times when you might miss out on Tweets we think you’d enjoy. To help you keep up with what’s happening, we’ve been testing ways to include these Tweets in your timeline -- ones we think you’ll find interesting or entertaining.

For example, we recently ran experiments that showed different types of content in your timeline: recommended Tweets, accounts and topics. Testing indicated that most people enjoy seeing Tweets from accounts they may not follow, based on signals such as activity from accounts you do follow, the popularity of the Tweets, and how people in your network interact with them.

Twitter's blog post didn't clarify how it determined what people "enjoy" -- whether the company just looked at the engagement rate on the suggested content, as Zeynep Tufekci suspects, or actually asked them directly in the form of surveys.

Either way, the results will embolden Twitter to move further down the path away from a timeline that's a strict reverse-chronological feed of updates from followed accounts, toward one that uses a mixture of signals to highlight content deemed most relevant.

To Twitter purists, the idea of seeing unsolicited updates from strangers just because an algorithm deems them relevant is an abomination. Some of them are even resorting to the F-word to express their disgust: Facebook. Journalism professor Jay Rosen is warning that Twitter will "go full Ice Bucket on us" if it continues on this trajectory, becoming a place where newsworthiness gives way to clickability.

But Rosen isn't hopeful that Twitter can be dissuaded from this course, and he's probably right. Trevor O'Brien, the author of the official blog post, hinted that the next phase of experimentation could involve tinkering with the "time" part of timeline: "As the timeline evolves, we will continue to show you Tweets you care about when they matter most." [Emphasis mine.]

Historically, "when they matter most" has equaled "right the heck now" for Twitter. "Real-time" is one of the attributes CEO Dick Costolo and other executives routinely cite as comprising Twitter's four pillars, the others being "widely-distributed," "conversational" and "public."

You'll notice that there's nothing in there about people only seeing tweets from accounts they follow. If Twitter fundamentalists are already so excercised about that rule being broken, how much more betrayed will they feel when it starts messing with its real core principles?