Micro-blogging giant Twitter has rolled out a new feature that will let users have a quick glance of the some of the important tweets they may have missed when they were offline.
Dubbed ‘while you were away’, 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 feature was first announced by Twitter back in November 2014. At the time, Twitter’s VP of product Kevin Weil said in a blog post “We can use information like who you follow and what you engage with to surface highlights of what you missed and show those to you as soon as you log back in or come back to the app.”
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.
“Every time you open the Twitter app, you’ll see something great,” Twitter said announcing the new feature.
The ‘While you were away’ feature was announced alongside the “instant timeline” feature which is expected to be launched in early 2015.
The new feature comes as part of Twitter’s efforts to rein in Facebook’s 1.3 billion users lead as against its own 284 million user mark. The tweet recap feature is being rolled out in a phase manner.
