Key Things to Know About Changes in Twitter’s Timeline

That’s certainly a lot better than Facebook’s algorithmically sorted news feed, but may not make hardcore Twitter users happy. “It all depends on implementation, but I think it will make Twitter more relevant, more valuable”.

“We think this is a great way to get even more out of Twitter and we’re excited for you to experience it. Let us know what you think”.

The move will be controversial to some; last week, when plans of a Twitter algorithm leaked, the hashtag #RIPTwitter trended worldwide.

The new timeline feature will appear whenever a user opens the app or loads the site and will return to a regular reverse chronological order format when the page is refreshed. It says that they will “help people see Tweets that are important to them” from people they follow most closely, instead of ordering all results in reverse chronological order. The real-time feed will now appear below the tweets picked out by Twitter. But you can tell by the time stamp that they aren’t in real time. He took to Twitter Saturday to explain the feature after a BuzzFeed report leaked news of the change on Friday. The rest of a subscriber’s tweets will be displayed underneath, in reverse chronological order.

While the feature remains optional for now in future it will be turned on by default and require users to opt-out of the service. Known as “Show me the best Tweets first“, it’s been in testing since December.

When you have this option enabled you will see the best Tweets when you login to Twitter, but you can quickly get rid of these tweets and see the normal listing of Tweets that you are used to. Throughout our tests, we also saw an increase in engagement for brands’ organic Tweets and an increase in engagement for Tweets about live events. Twitter CEO responded to that controversy and said that while changes were coming they wouldn’t be that drastic.

Stop press: This afternoon, Twitter revealed its Q4 2015 financial figures [PDF] showing that it had 320 million monthly active users in the final quarter of the year.