14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter is looking at another way of adjusting its feed to make things better for users and they may just be giving people a way to look at specific topics soon.
The idea to allow users to check out specific topics on top of following other users came from Yousaf Sekander, director of RocketMill, an Internet marketing firm who wrote to Dick Costolo, Twitter CEO.
While he wasn’t exactly expecting to get a reply from the man himself, Sekander actually got an email back from Costolo.
“What you are talking about is something we have discussed internally for some time and is related to the notion of topic-based timelines as you would expect. There’s a lot to it, but yes, this is an opportunity that we understand and think about,” reads the email Costolo wrote back.
Now, the notion isn’t that much of a foreign idea for those who use TweetDeck, a Twitter app that the company acquired a while back. The service allows people to create custom timelines based on topics and hashtags, to single out various accounts they want to look into and more. Twitter’s web version service has a limited usability in this regard, but the company has been trying to adjust more and to bring out more data for users.
Sekander’s idea takes things a step further in the idea that you would only get to see a certain individual’s tweets if they refer to a certain topic that you’re interested in, such as, let’s say, the NSA mass surveillance.
With the new tool, you’d get the chance to only look at tweets that interest you, even if a certain person you follow may write about other things too.
New features are always in the works
Twitter has actually been playing around with some ways to curate tweets during the World Cup event, but also to recommend things to people that they may be interested in via the @magicrecs account that it created a while back. Recently, it started filling up your timeline with messages from accounts you don’t follow when the people you do keep an eye on aren’t tweeting when you’re refreshing the page.
Still, there’s a long way from Costolo’s confirmed intentions to implement such a measure and actually getting to see it on Twitter so it could be a long time before we meet this new feature. Either way, it would be nice to have such a feature.