Twitter has announced it has rolled out ‘while you were away’ feature to iOS users and that separate versions for the web and Android platforms are slated to be coming soon.
The ‘while you were away’ feature let users have a quick glance of the some of the important tweets they may have missed when they were offline. The new feature shows the best tweets to the top of a user’s timeline that they may have missed in between login times.
The new feature works similar as Facebook’s news feed, which shows status updates and posts in a ranked manner rather than presenting them in a chronological order. The ‘while you were away’ feature is the first major Twitter feature, other than promoted tweets and adverts, to not follow the chronological format for displaying content.
In the announcement blog, Twitter noted that “A lot can happen while you’re on the go. To fill in some of those gaps, we will surface a few of the best Tweets you probably wouldn’t have seen otherwise, determined by engagement and other factors. If you check in on Twitter now and then for a quick snapshot of what’s happening, you’ll see this recap more often; if you spend a lot of time on Twitter already, you’ll see it less.”
“Our goal is to help you keep up – or catch up – with your world, no matter how much time you spend on Twitter. 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,” the micro-blogging giant added.
