Twitter recently rolled out a new feature

Twitter recently rolled out a new feature

Twitter recently rolled out a new feature which allows users to have a quick glance at some of the tweets they may have missed since their last login. The ‘While you were away’ feature essentially shows the best tweets on top of your homepage when you open the app or the website.

Now sites like The Verge, Guardian and TechCrunch are reporting that the feature is live for some. We are yet to see the feature on any of our feeds.

‘While you were away’ focuses on giving the user a recap of some of the tweets which they could have missed in a timeline filled with hundreds of tweets.  It is not clear on how Twitter chooses these top tweets but it could be dependent on the number of retweets or favourites it has received or the kind of engagement a tweet has seen from other users.

“Every time you open the Twitter app, you’ll see something great,” Twitter had said when it announced the new feature in November. This feature is also similar to Facebook’s ‘Top Stories’ feature which gives the user a recap of some of the major stories that have taken place on a particular day.

Essentially this feature is Twitter’s way of ensuring that users get a simplified sense of what were the key tweets, discussions on the site, instead of getting inundated with a lot of irrelevant stuff. For Twitter, this feature is a must-have given that the social media site has seen user engagement and growth fall in the last quarter.  Whether it will boost engagement remains to be seen and that can only be gauged once the global roll-out takes place.