When Twitter (TWTR) co-founder Jack Dorsey came back on as CEO, he vowed to make some drastic changes to get Twitter back on track. Last week, the company announced its testing one of those changes: a non-chronological timeline.
“You will see us continue to question our reverse chronological timeline, and all the work it takes to build one by finding and following accounts,” Dorsey said. “We continue to show a questioning of our fundamentals in order to make the product easier and more accessible to more people.”
The idea is to surface the best content to users as they scroll through their timelines. In the past, it’s been strictly chronological, which means when that acquaintance of yours goes on a 15-tweet rant that you couldn’t care less about, you have to scroll through the whole thing to get past it.
Why they’re doing it
The test has been rolled out to only a few users thus far, but it seems they’re none too happy about it. Long-time users used to the chronological timeline have complained that it’s confusing. So why are they doing it? Well, because they know it works for Facebook.
When Mark Zuckerberg’s company launched a non-chronological timeline, users weren’t happy about it. But over time, they got used to it and some have even come to appreciate that they’re more likely to see posts interesting to them than every random post from every random friend they don’t really care about.
Twitter and Facebook have been copying each other for years, and this is just the latest thing.
Why it won’t work
Just because it works for Facebook (FB), however, doesn’t mean it’s going to work fro Twitter. Fortune writer Dan Primack, mentioned in a tweet that the a non-chronological timeline, if implemented, would devalue what is arguably Twitter’s most valuable proposition (and something Facebook doesn’t excel at): real-time news.
Can you imagine trying to keep up with breaking news on your Twitter feed and you keep running into popular tweets from a day ago? That might be more than users can handle and would likely lead to more people leaving than more people joining.
Why none of it will work
Twitter has had so many chances to change and improve, but it didn’t mainly out of fear of alienating its core users. Facebook, on the other hand, made changes when it felt like it was necessary, following Steve Jobs’ line of thinking: “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
So instead of showing core users a better Twitter, the company stuck with a mediocre product. Now that things have become direr than ever and the company no longer has the support of shareholders and Wall Street, it’s too late. No matter what Twitter does, it’s unlikely to change the perception of both users and investors alike. Every time it gets a huge jump from some announcement, shares fall back to low levels within days or even hours.
We’re at a point where only an acquisition would make sense.
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