The micro-blogging site Twitter is experimenting with a Facebook-type way of sorting your timeline where tweets are sorted by relevance and not in reverse chronological order as it happens now.
According to motherboard.vice.com, Twitter is working with algorithms similar to the ones Facebook uses to order items on your news feed.
"This is an experiment. We're continuing to explore ways to surface the best content for people using Twitter," a company spokeswoman was quoted as saying.
Twitter has been hinting towards an algorithmic-driven news feed for more than a year.
The test is part of CEO Jack Dorsey's promise for bold changes to Twitter to help get it out of its slow growth, Wall Street Journal reported.
"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 earlier this year.
"We continue to show a questioning of our fundamentals in order to make the product easier and more accessible to more people," he added.
The reverse chronological timeline has been fundamental to Twitter since it began nine years ago and has made sense for a real-time service.
The format has its merits but it can also cause users to miss interesting content while they are away.
Scrolling back through the timeline can be frustrating for new users searching for relevant content.
According to slate.com, the out-of-order tweets don't show up every time a user opens the app or website, however. They seem to appear most often when the user logs in for the first time in several hours, much like the "While You Were Away" tweets that regularly appear at the top of users' timelines when they 've been offline for a while.
The new timeline will also adapt to users' behavior to some extent. If they spend a lot of time scrolling down their feeds to find older tweets, they'll start to see the nonchronological ordering more often. On the other hand, if they're regularly refreshing their feed to see more recent tweets, it will infer that they're interested more of a real-time experience and the timeline will revert to the old reverse-chronological order, slate.com said.
