Twitter on Thursday rolled out a overhauled home screen for its iOS users — including some in India — in which it promises it a more seamless browsing experience.
According to Twitter's official support handle, for iOS users, the "Home" and "Latest" tabs have been replaced by the "For You" and "Following" tabs. The aim of "For You" is for you to get the feed tailored to your interests — based on your activity on the platform, including targeted advertisements — while "Following". gives you a feed of the accounts you follow and their activity.
For now, the feature is available only to iOS users, with no mention of a timeline for release to Android users. According to sources, this is but one part of a larger Twitter makeover. Insiders tell CNBC-TV18 that Elon Musk's long-promised, much-vaunted "long-form tweets" feature will roll only in February, at the earliest, although we have no idea of the character count in that feature. At the moment, tweets are restricted to 240 characters, though users can post long notes using the Twitter Notes feature.
So, does the new update work as promised?
It's early days yet. The tabs appear to be self-explanatory, but the "For You" tab deserves a little explanation. I've been playing with this feature for a few hours, switching between "For You" and "Following", and so far, "For You" has proved... not useful, not quite yet.
All I am subjected to is a series of tweets from accounts I may have interacted with — however tangentially — or those that that the accounts I follow have interacted with, directly or otherwise.
In time, I suspect this feature will be refined and give you an experience based on your usage of the app but for now, it's Twitter just shoving its algorithm-generated feed in your face.
"Following" is a little different. This tab features a sequential order of tweets, quote-tweets or retweets by the accounts you follow, with the newest tweets at the top.
Twitterati's reactions have been predictably mixed, with a sizeable contingent demanding that the social media company revert to the simpler "Latest Tweets" format.
With the update rolling out gradually, and as Twitter collects more data from Tweeple who use the feature more and more frequently, expect it to become something akin to your Instagram feed — algorithm-generated, ads targeted on which promoted tweets you interact with it, et al.
For now, it's just an auto-generated jumble that doesn't really seem any different from what I was used to earlier.
