San Francisco: Twitter Inc made a dramatic product change on Wednesday saying it will recast the way it displays tweets on Its homepage by customising them to individual users, instead of uniformly displaying tweets in reverse chronological order. The change to the timeline as the homepage is known – is also designed to appeal to advertisers by giving more prominence to tweets that advertisers pay for to promote products. The change comes just hours before Twitter reports fourth quarter earnings to investors, who have been pressuring the company to increase user growth and ad revenue by making the product easier to use. Reports that Twitter could be changing the timeline surfaced last week, prompting lagments by users tweeting with the hashtag #RIPTwitter. They said using customised or algorithmic, timeline similar to Facebook’s News Feed meant Twitter would lose one of Its signature feature.
The move to have tweets paid for by advertisers surface higher In individual’s time lines is expected to make it more likely users will respond to ads. In testing the new time-line Twitter as the wrote in a blog post that it saw in also increased user to appea1 to interaction with ads and tweets about live events. Advertisers have said their ads can get lost in the timeline. Twitter said it analyzed how users have engaged with billions of tweets to determine what they are most interested in. When users open their timeline, they will see several tweets from the past several hours that Twitter thinks they are most likely to interact with. Underneath it they will see the traditional reverse chronological time line. Users can choose to opt out of the new algorithmic time- line. Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive and co-founder, tried to reassure users in a series of tweets last week that Twitter would remain the place for live news and commentary. “Twitter is real-time. Twitter is about who & what you follow. And Twitter is here to stay. By becoming more Twittery” Dorsey wrote. “We’re going to continue to refine it to make Twitter feel more not less live”.
