Twitter to introduce Facebook-style timeline in 23 countries, including India

Twitter is planning to introduce a new algorithmic timeline like Facebook in 23 countries, including India, as soon as next week in an attempt to bring the micro-blogging site to more people across the globe.

According to BuzzFeed, the new timeline will reorder tweets based on what Twitter’s algorithm thinks people want to see most, a radical departure from the present reverse chronological order of tweets in the micro-blogging site’s current feed. The new timeline is a way for Twitter to elevate popular content, make content accessible to everyone even if they are not signed in, and feed people what they want to see and discuss most.

“Before today, you could see individual Tweets, but it was hard to discover stories and conversations happening on Twitter without signing in. Now, you can check out a news story as it unfolds,” Paul Lambert, product manager of Twitter, wrote on the micro-blogging website’s blog on Tuesday. “It’s real-time and straight from the source, just like the Twitter experience for those who log in,” he added.

The home timeline will be rolled out to people in 23 countries, including India, who visit the twitter.com homepage on their mobile devices. Twitter is also planning to expand a refreshed twitter.com homepage, which is already available in the US and Japan, to 23 other countries. However, it is not yet clear whether Twitter will force users to use the algorithmic feed, or it will merely be an option, BuzzFeed News reported.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey also suggested last year the company’s efforts towards making Twitter more intuitive and user-friendly in the coming future. “We continue to show a questioning of our fundamentals in order to make the product easier and more accessible to more people,” he said.

In November, the company killed off the traditional term favorites and replaced it with likes.