Twitter (NASDAQ: TWTR) users are expecting new changes since it was reported that the 140-character social network will introduce plans for an algorithmic timeline.
Currently, tweets are ordered chronologically. Nonetheless, when rumors appeared on Saturday, CEO Jack Dorsey said that he loves live stream and that the company is continuously listening to its users.
New decisions would appear to come since the company has been losing several investors over the last year. Analysts have said that new changes are being expected by users and market investors, if the company does not innovate, the number of engaged active users will continue to decrease.
Such a decision has caused controversy among users since an algorithmic timeline would be ordered by machines and not by users. However, it is still not clear whether the company would obligate its users to have their timelines ordered by algorithms or if they would have the option to maintain their chronologically ordered feeds. Brian, Blau, an analyst at Gartner said that twitter needs to introduce new changes in order to serve the widest possible audience.
“Such as an algorithmic approach to the ordering of tweets will help them adjust that content to serve the widest possible audience… While the core value of Twitter today is strong, and their users are engaged, the service won’t be able to grow and attract new users until their approach to content delivery, user experience, and even the core tweet experiences are evolved to better meet the needs of social networking users globally,” he added.
Rumors seem to suggest that the company has already started testing plans among some groups of users. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey wrote on Saturday, referring to the trending topic “#RIPTwitter”, that the company was always listening to its users and that the team of developers had never planned to reorder timelines this week.
Since Jack Dorsey started leading the company the social network has replaced the “favorites” for “likes”. Also, analysts have suggested that the 140-character-limit rule will be broken, and users will be allowed to post contents of up to 10,000 characters in the next months.
“Twitter is live. Twitter is real-time. Twitter is about who & what you follow. Twitter is here to stay! By becoming more Twitter-y. I *love* real-time. We love the live stream. It’s us. And we’re going to continue to refine it to make Twitter feel more, not less, live!” Wrote Jack Dorsey on Saturday. “Twitter can help make connections in real-time based on dynamic interests and topics, rather than a static social/friend graph. We get it,” he added later.
Relevant decline of Twitter shares
On Monday, the company announced the retirement of a group of top executives. The product head Kevin Weil, engineering head Alex Roetter and media head Katie Jacobs Stanton are leaving the company in a moment when users appear to be disgusted by rumors of new changes.
As a response, Twitter shares fell to $14.87 on Monday morning, which can be translated as the lowest price per share since the company became public in November 2013. Twitter has already more than 320 monthly active users worldwide and 1 billion unique visits monthly to sites with embedded tweets, according to the company.
Source: Twitter CEO