Twitter rolled out a new feature on Wednesday, Jan. 21, that lets users find out the hottest stories that have been going around Twitter while they were away.
The feature called Recaps shows users the three biggest tweets that users have missed since they last logged in. These recaps are marked with a heading that says "While you were away..." and are chosen based on social signals such as how often the tweets were retweeted, favorited, and replied to, which is similar to how Facebook's algorithm chooses what appears on users' News Feeds.
"Our goal is to help you keep up -- or catch up -- with your world, no matter how much time you spend on Twitter," said Twitter product manager Paul Rosania. "With a few improvements to the home timeline, we think we can do a better job of delivering on that promise without compromising the real-time nature of Twitter."
iOS users will get first dibs on Recaps. The new feature will appear on the Twitter website and the Android app "soon."
Recaps is directed toward users who don't often use Twitter. For people who are on Twitter the entire time, they won't likely get a summary of what's been happening since they've been gone if they have never logged out. However, Twitter hopes the Recaps will increase engagement in Twitter users who only occasionally log in, as it eliminates the tediousness of going through an entire stream of tweets to find out what has been going on.
As Twitter vice president of product Kevin Weil tells the New York Times in an interview, the idea is to give users a snapshot of what they missed, whether they have been away for a week or an hour. Weil is quick to point out, however, that unlike Facebook, which dismisses chronology altogether, Recaps is only for the three most important tweets that the user missed. Then it goes back to the chronological list of tweets that appear in real-time.
For now, users won't be able to control Recaps. They do not have the option to get rid of it, pull it up even when they have been logged in for a while, or choose which types of stories they want to show up. However, they can dismiss Recaps when they log in, and if they do this often, Twitter will learn that they don't want to see recaps and will show them less and less.
Twitter first introduced the idea of putting up a "While you were away..." section in November, when it previewed the feature to investors who were unhappy about Twitter's sluggish growth. In last year's third quarter, the most recent period for which figures are available, Twitter said it had 284 million monthly active users, signifying a 23 percent growth from the same period in the previous year.
However, Twitter said revenue growth could slow down for the fourth quarter, an announcement that led to Twitter's shares plunging 23 percent.
