Twitter clearly has understood the concerns related to augmented user engagement on the site, and has now effectively started testing an instant timeline feature that could come to the company's aid in this regard.
With the feature in place, the site will ask for the user's smartphone contact list access, according to a blogpost on The New York Times. And when that access is provided, it will start scanning if the concerned user really does have a Twitter account. However, the sign-up process remains the same.
As the report has suggested, the latest instant timeline feature was first brought to light in a discussion with Twitter's investors in November. The instant timeline will now ensure that new users who log into the site will be open to good content, without the need to follow hundreds of users.
The report explains that Twitter looks into your contacts and uses information like who they are and who they follow on Twitter to guess which accounts and topics might be of your interest. And if you are concerned about the entire algorithm that's involved, the report states it is reasonably precise.
Nonetheless, Twitter isn't letting go of its more traditional 'Follow' method, although the instant timeline feature is already there. And moreover, this is not what Twitter has in mind. The company has already made it known that the importance of Twitter can be refined by fine-tuning it to follow the people and topics that you will be most interested in. It is also to be noted that the instant timeline feature was recently tested out by New York Times' Vindu Goel, who later explained it in the blog
The instant timeline has frequent reminders urging you to follow people and "built-in tutorials" for added help. It also offers frequent reminders urging you to follow people, "including one that stayed at the top of my feed for quite a while."
Apparently, the feature even appeared to some new users signing up on Android phones last week, adds the report. But more importantly, this is something new for Twitter that's intended to stay afloat in a social media circuit that is massively growing.
And with the likes of WhatsApp and Instagram already having surpassed Twitter in terms of users, usage and growth, it is only natural that the company would take a bigger action against the ongoing slump.
However, as we see it, the only detrimental thing about such a smartphone contact-oriented process is that a lot of Twitter users might have friends with no Twitter accounts on their list. Or that their Twitter accounts have different user names compared to what is saved in the handset. But it's a fresh start, nonetheless.
