Twitter announced today that its introducing a new feature on everyone’s home timeline where you’ll be shown an overview of popular tweets you may have missed from accounts you follow.
The announcement states:
“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.”
The ‘while you were away’ recap will appear more or less frequently depending on how you use Twitter. If you only check in on Twitter in short bursts you’ll see the recap more often. If you engage with Twitter for longer periods of time you will see the recap less frequently.
It sounds like Twitter is doing the best it can to make this new feature as useful as possible while minimizing its intrusiveness. Twitter’s goal, the company explains, is not to compromise the real time nature of the service.
It’s worth pointing out that, unlike Twitter’s recommended tweets feature, these recaps will only contain tweets from people actually follow. You’ll only see tweets you have already opted in to see, so to speak.
Starting today, Twitter users on iOS will start to see the ‘while you were away’ recap section. Android and twitter.com users will get the feature sometime soon, but no definite timeframe was given.
