Twitter Adds Real-Time Activity Feed, with Favorite, Retweet and Follow Notifications

Twitter is making two subtle but important changes to its website that could really impact the way most people use the site, or rather, how much they use the site.

Twitter is changing the @Mentions column to include more than replies, it will list all activity related to you, including your tweets others add as favorite, when someone retweets your stuff, or when someone starts following you.

There is also a new Activity tab which does the same things, but for your followers.

These new, real-time, feeds offer new ways of engaging with the site and seeing what others are doing.

In theory they should drive up engagement and therefore time spent on the site, but we'll have to wait and see until after Twitter finishes rolling out the changes to everyone, which may take a few weeks.

"Today, we’re rolling out two new features on Twitter.com that help you discover more on Twitter," Twitter announced.

"You can now see when someone favorites or retweets one of your Tweets. You can also learn which Tweets are most interesting and inspiring to the people you follow," it added.

The @Mentions tab is being renamed @yourusername and will contain not only mentions but also every other activity that involves your account and your content.

This could be your tweets that other people mark as favorite, a feature that has been around as long as Twitter has but which is now getting a second lease on life.

Or it could be your tweets that others retweeted, a feature that third-party clients have incorporated for quite some time, including TweetDeck, which Twitter now owns.

The tab will also list your most recent followers, perhaps helping you discover interesting people that you can follow back.

The new Activity tab is exactly the same except it includes activities from the people you follow. This includes retweets, favorites or following new accounts.

Key to all of this is that you can easily engage with the content and accounts yourself, you can follow an account one of your friends recently started following, for example.

The changes also bring favorite tweets back into the spotlight. This little used feature now gets a purpose, your followers will be able to see which tweets you favorite, bringing social bookmarking, of sorts, to Twitter.