Twitter's 'Instant Timeline' is actually a really good idea

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/04/twitter-instant-timeline-mainstream-users

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Hey, Twitter! Keep your meddling hands off my timeline! If I catch you coming round here with sneaky Facebook-style algorithmic curation to mess about with the purity of my reverse-chronological tweetfeed, I’ll ditch you for

App.net

Menshn

Ello

er... something else.

For most veterans of Twitter, threats to quit are usually empty, but the unrest at the thought of the social network messing about with its core feature – the unfiltered, reverse-chronological timeline – is very real.

Whenever the company experiments with some form of curation, or hints at plans to do so, we get shouty – most recently when Twitter started inserting tweets favourited by friends into your timeline, and then other “recommended tweets, accounts and topics”.

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Now there’s talk of a new experiment, but experienced Twitter users can rest at ease: it’s not going to mess with our timelines, but it could make Twitter a much more accessible service for people signing up for the first time.

It’s called Instant Timeline, and it has just started a period of public testing according to the New York Times, which explained how it works for people who have just registered for Twitter:

“Twitter analyzes your contacts and uses information like who they are and who they follow on Twitter to guess which accounts and topics might interest you. It then shows you those tweets in your feed.

So if your friends are foodies, you will see items about recipes and food trends. If they are football lovers or fans of Ellen DeGeneres, you will see National Football League video highlights and tweets from comic actors. The result is a timeline of (hopefully) compelling tweets without your needing to follow a single account.”

For now, a smattering of new users signing up from Android smartphones will get Instant Timeline, which is also designed to remind them to follow accounts that it thinks will be relevant, but also to gradually reduce the amount of tweets it inserts into the timeline as those users build their own network.

If you’ve ever sat down with a friend who wants to sign up to Twitter but has no idea who to follow, and helped them by recommending a selection of comedians, or footballers, or journalists, activists, musicians, biophysicists, authors, or... Well, anyone, then you’ll see the appeal of automating this process.

When I think about my family and friends outside the technology industry, they’re all on Facebook, but only a handful are on Twitter. I’m pretty sure that if I had 20 minutes with any of those that aren’t, I could get them up and running following 30 or so accounts that they’d be interested in.

I’d be happy to hand that challenge over to an algorithm, if it could do the job. Figuring that out, of course, is the task of the public tests of the Instant Timeline feature.

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Twitter had 284 million active users the last time it published figures, but the company has been facing questions from analysts and journalists for some time about whether it’s doing a good enough job at retaining new users with its “onboarding” process after they’ve signed up.

With Instant Timeline, the company looks to be keeping its balance on the tightrope-walk between making its service more accessible for newcomers, and not destroying its value for its existing users – especially those of us whose hackles rise at the thought of our timelines being curated by anyone other than ourselves.

Every internet service faces this kind of tension between early adopters and newer, mainstream users. Twitter is at a sensitive moment in terms of proving it can attract more of the latter without alienating the former.

This, at the same time as continuing to build its advertising business and introducing new video features, both of which have implications for the level of clutter in people’s timelines – albeit without any hint yet that it will remove any tweets to make room.

Early adopters can be relied upon to kick up a fuss if that changes. But for now, Instant Timeline could help to bring the service that we (mostly) love to an even wider audience.