Twitter is getting a new CEO, so it must be time for some bold new directions. But what should Twitter do? Here’s a suggestion that I’ve read at least half a dozen times in the past couple of days:
Right now, Twitter displays tweets in strict reverse chronological order, but [Chris] Sacca encourages Twitter to relax this assumption. Instead, when a user logs in, the platform should show a selection of the most interesting and insightful tweets that would have appeared on the user’s timeline since the last check-in.
The counterargument here is that a more accessible version of Twitter already exists. It’s called Facebook, and it’s wildly popular. The danger is that aping Facebook might alienate existing users more quickly than it attracts new ones.
I totally get this. I only follow 200 people on Twitter, and even at that it’s like a firehose. All I can do is dip into it whenever it happens to cross my mind. This means that once an hour or so I see 10 or 20 random tweets, and then go back to whatever I was doing. I almost certainly miss lots of stuff I’d be interested in.
At the same time, chronological order is pretty handy if you’re having a conversation, or some kind of news is breaking. I wouldn’t want to give that up.
But why should I? Is there really any technological barrier to having both? I’d love to toggle back and forth. Maybe I’d take a look at the algorithmic feed once an hour to see if I’ve missed anything important, and then switch to the chronological feed if something was going on or if I just felt like randomly dipping in to the firehose. Sometimes random is good, after all. It keeps you out of a rut.
So….what’s the deal here? Why can’t we have both?
UPDATE: Atrios comments here. FWIW, I blame Apple.
