The chronological news feed has been a bit of a looming specter for Twitter . Sure, it’s their bread-and-butter but it only works for users who are willing to put in the time to prune their own feeds and strip away follows while constantly keeping an eye out for new accounts. For Twitter, a major challenge is discovering how they can update the experience for casual users who follow a few accounts but haven’t gotten deep into the discovery phase yet.
Twitter’s efforts to double-down on surfacing live events coverage and catering to users’ specific areas of interest have been an evolving mission for the company, but today, the company is announcing some of their boldest moves yet to change how the app grow to understand a user base on their interactions.
The company is making some major updates to the Explore feed, which will now surface curated news stories surrounding breaking news, live events and stories in a way that will drive a closer fit to individual user’s interests and help them find more of what’s happening across the site.
For Twitter, it’s a logical evolution of Moments which were introduced in 2015 to drive conversations and curate stories from the Twitterverse.
There’s going to be a big mix of what is being curated by humans and algorithms as the company looks to marry the editorial voice it has built up in Moments with its human curation team with a highly-targeted algorithm that can find interests and grab the latest tweets that meet them. It’s all about striking a balance and understanding the limits of curation in each situation, the company tells me.
“We wouldn’t, for example, set a human on the task of trying to identify all of the relevant live conversations coming out in real time in a particular situation so that’s where algorithmic curation comes in,” Twitter’s Director of Curation Joanna Geary told TechCrunch.
Now, for something like a breaking news story, you’ll be able to find what some of the most important tweets that have really driven the story, alongside a tab to explore what is coming in live.
Twitter has been exploring the promises of the algorithmic feed for quite some time, but it’s opted to push most of these minor updates to the Explore feed or just to the top of users’ main feeds with brief “what you missed” interactions. This isn’t changing with today’s updates either, the company isn’t shifting the fundamentals of how your feed flows back in time, instead its seeking to offer snippets that help you move on tangents for discovery.
“For us, the heart of Twitter is all about discussing and discovering what’s happening right now,” Twitter Senior Director of Product Management Sriram Krishnan told TechCrunch. “People’s home timelines aren’t changing, we are going to show these experiences at the top of your home timeline but everything below it will continue to be the same.”
While users of the service have gotten used to the frequent changes in the company’s Explore tab, what will be new are the push notifications that Twitter is sending to users to direct them towards new or developing stories. Doing this in a highly targeted capacity is going to be pretty critical for Twitter. People are already annoyed by the constant notifications from social media services that they explicitly okayed, when there’s deviation from that people can get upset.
