Twitter Tests Tweet Update Notifications

Twitter may have been getting a lot of attention lately thanks to its new Lists feature, but this doesn't change the fact that it's facing a problem that seems to have been sticking with it for several months now. Traffic has stalled for the microblogging service and many users leave after the novelty factor wears off. The Lists feature and the translation effort may help with the first part, but it still needs to address the engagement issue, so it's making one first step with the new “tweet notifications.”

“We’re starting a limited test of notifications on twitter.com for when you have new tweets. So if one of the folks you follow has tweeted since you loaded your homepage, you’ll get a little notice saying '1 new tweet' that, when clicked, will display the new content,” Twitter announced the new feature that is still in testing. “We think it improves the tweet consumption experience and hope to roll it out to everyone as soon as we can.”

The feature is being rolled out to a few users to see how it goes. Those who get to test it will receive a notification on top of their Twitter stream alerting them if there have been new tweets from their friends or the people they follow since the last time they refreshed the page. The notifications look and feel very much like the ones in Twitter search, which show how many new tweets have come in for the specific search term.

This could prove useful and might make users spend more time on the site, but many are thinking this new feature, along with the search notifications, is just a poor man's real-time stream and that the tweets and search results should automatically update. In fact, Twitter used to have this automated system in the early days, but, as it took off, it became clear that it couldn't scale it to the surge of new users. The technical side of the problem may not be a real issue anymore, though Twitter still isn't one of the most reliable services, but it could be that, because of its size, Twitter couldn't introduce an automated update, as it would overwhelm users, especially those who follow a lot of people.