Twitter rolls out ‘Show me the best Tweets first’ feature

In the wake of a fiery debate at the weekend, Twitter has begun introducing a new timeline feature.

In the wake of a fiery debate at the weekend, Twitter has begun introducing a new timeline feature that highlight tweets a user might have missed away from the service.

But Twitter says it will preserve reverse chronological order with missed tweets appearing in time order above the rest of your tweet stream, also in time order.

But there won’t be anything to distinguish one group from another, except for each tweet’s time stamp. So, feeds that access this feature will be out of reverse chronological order, although Twitter would probably not see it in those terms. And the feature is optional.

The rollout began globally at 1am today.

In a media statement today, Twitter said the timeline feature would be active when users hadn’t recently checked their feed. The service would help them “catch up on the best tweets from the accounts they follow — to never miss an important tweet again,” Twitter says.

“When a user opens Twitter after being away for a while, the tweets they are most likely to care about will appear at the top of the timeline — still recent and in reverse chronological order.

“The rest of the tweets will be displayed right underneath, also in reverse chronological order, as always. At any point, users can pull-to-refresh to see all new tweets at the top in the live, up-to-the-second experience they already know and love.”

Users can activate it from the timeline section of settings and choosing ‘Show me the best tweets first’. And it can be turned off again in settings.

More information is at the Twitter Blog.

And Twitter wants user feedback. “We’ve already seen that people who use this new feature tend to retweet and tweet more, creating more live commentary and conversations, which is great for everyone.”

Twitter will switch on the feature for individual users in coming weeks. Users will be notified in their timeline.

The social network was subjected to a huge backlash at the weekend when the feature was mooted as entirely changing the order of tweets chronologically.

Some users threatened to quit Twitter entirely if the change was implemented. “Honestly, @twitter. if you take away my timeline, I will never, ever use your service again,” said @emilysteers online.

Actor Rob Lowe was among those expressing outrage. “One of the great rewards of being an adult is deciding ON YOUR OWN who (and what) you should be interested in,” said Lowe in a tweet to 1.22 million followers.

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey then sought to dampen the speculation. “I *love* real-time. We love the live stream. It’s us. And we’re going to continue to refine it to make Twitter feel more, not less, live!,” Dorsey said in a tweet on his @jack account.

Twitter had experimented with the idea last year and Dorsey has said that the practice of displaying tweets in time order in a feed is worth questioning. “You will see us continue to question our reverse chronological timeline, and all the work it takes to build one by finding and following accounts, through experiences like ‘while you were away’. We continue to show a questioning of our fundamentals in order to make the product easier and more accessible to more people.”