Twitter starts testing “while you were away” Facebook-newsfeed style feature

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Twitter has started testing a new feature which will sort through your tweets since the last time you checked Twitter, and display the most important/relevant ones, without you having to scroll through the whole lot.

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The news comes via many Twitter users, who have started seeing the section appearing in their app.

The way it works is similar to the Facebook newsfeed – which doesn’t show you everything, but algorithmically selects the posts that it believes will be most relevant to you. In Twitter’s case, this will presumably be based on a number of factors, such as number of retweets, favourites and who is mentioned in each tweet.

The move could prove controversial though. A feature like this has been rumoured for months and has been making existing Twitter users nervous that the company could break the traditional way that Twitter works – in which users curate their own streams rather than have Twitter’s algorithms do it for them.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments!

James O’Malley
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