Twitter is a wonderful place to share ideas and view the ideas of others. The best way to find tweets from the people you care about is on your timeline. That is, it USED to be the best way. Recently, Twitter has made it so that tweets from users you do not follow can actually show up in your timeline. This began as an experiment, but now it is pretty much standard with all twitter users.
Trevor O’Brien, an employee from Twitter’s production team responded to the claims in a blog post. To summarize, he basically said that even though its great to get tweets from people you follow, sometimes people miss out on important or entertaining tweets from people that they don’t follow. One of the ways you would see a tweet from someone you did not follow is if the person’s tweet had been “favorited” by someone you follow. O’Brien explained that their research indicates that twitter users would like to see this type of information. This type of feature would most likely be helpful to a new twitter user. If someone had just joined the social network recently, it would be great to see a variety of tweets fill up their timeline. However for the many users who have been using twitter for a long time it can be a nuisance due to the fact that they have their own preferences for who’s tweets they want to see in their timeline.
Twitter believes that adding tweets to the timelines of it’s users would be a positive thing, however many users are expressing dissatisfaction to seeing these types of tweets. This move by Twitter may end up doing more harm than good for the social network.
Well. What do you think? I think that we have all had enough of these SM companies messing about with what was a perfectly good application when it started. There are plenty of opportunities for us to expand our connections without outside “helpful” intervention.
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