After months of rumors regarding a revamped Twitter timeline, the company finally announced an official change on Wednesday morning. From now on, you’ll see all of the most important tweets you missed while you were away at the top of your timeline as soon as you log in… but only if you turn on the feature first.
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With the feature activated, Twitter will populate the top of your timeline with all of the tweets it thinks you need to see in reverse chronological order. Once you’ve scrolled past everything you missed, the standard timeline will be right there waiting for you, also still in reverse chronological order.
No, it’s not quite as drastic a change as many analysts and journalists were predicting, but it’s a shift that will make the service more like Facebook than it ever has been in the past. Thankfully, it’s all optional for now, but a blog post from Twitter suggests that the company will be turning the feature on for all of us in the coming weeks.
If you want to turn on the feature right now, simply head to the Timeline section of the Settings menu and choose ‘Show me the best tweets first’. If you hate it, deactivate it. Even when it switches on by default, you’ll still be able to turn it off, but of course, that hasn’t stopped throngs of dissatisfied users from raising a ruckus:
“We’re not changing the timeline!”
(3 days later)
“We’ve changed the timeline!”https://t.co/TLjOchY9Bk— Thomas Fuchs #BLM (@thomasfuchs) February 10, 2016
Looks like the algorithmic timeline of Twitter nobody asked for is going live. Will initially be opt-in, then it'll switch to being opt-out.
— Daryl Surat (@DarylSurat) February 10, 2016
https://twitter.com/sdkian/status/697423604640657408
Dear @twitter This out of sync timeline is #BS. #fail #sucks
— Natalie (@gnat65) February 10, 2016
Why am I seeing stuff from 3 hours ago that I already liked at the top of my timeline??? Ugh. @Twitter sucks.
— Michelle Quist (@MichelleLQuist) February 10, 2016
