“One of our goals for experimentation is to continue improving your home timeline. After all, that’s the best way to keep up with everything happening in your world.”

The above quote comes directly from Twitter as they prepare to roll out a new experiment in which they’ll surface tweets and accounts from people you don’t currently follow, in your existing timeline.

Already, there’s a lot negativity and pushback about what this will mean for your personal experience. Of course these changes are being compared to Facebook’s update earlier this year to their Newsfeed algorithm (in which they started to filter what you were seeing to make your experience more personalized).

While on the surface these changes seem harmless as the two social juggernauts attempt to curate a more tailored experience for their users. But does anyone else get an uneasy “Big Brother” type feel to these updates?

Yes – computers are getting more and more intelligent about predicting content and people and products that I probably want to see, but this is all based on historical data and doesn’t account for me finding new interests, experiencing new things and generally evolving as a person. Without some human oversight, the data is dumb and one-dimensional. For someone like my wife, who already finds Twitter too cluttered and busy, this exacerbates an existing problem with the platform. Twitter works best when you curate your own lists and feeds depending on personal topics and interest.

There are many factors at play – most of which stem from the two platforms generating a profit and pulling in new advertisers – and at the end of the day, these are their platforms to do with as they wish. 

One could argue that no other social channel has been more shaped and defined by it’s users than Twitter, so a change of this magnitude could come back to haunt them, but is it enough for people to jump ship? What are your thoughts?

Posted by
Gary Edgar
on 17/10/2014