While You Were Away Is Too Facebooky
Here we go again. Another product decision out of Twitter which reinforces the feeling that it doesn't have a clue. Rolling out to users in the Home timeline is another Facebook newsfeed algorithm to display tweets that “it feels” we would have missed or wanted to see since we last visited Twitter.
Who exactly asked for this? Is Twitter's management team so far removed from its userbase that it feels Facebook is the platform to copy?
The best tweet I've seen about this is below:
Well done @twitter, ‘while you were away’ successfully removes the 'now' dynamic from the platform http://t.co/cj6fnY4xEV
— Kath Austin (@Kath_Austin) January 1, 2015
As Twitter's management team continues to pursue users it doesn't have or who complain because of the results of their own poor tweeting and following habits, it removes the very reason we came here in the first place – to live in the “now”, to enjoy serendipity and an island free from the algo love of Facebook.
Will someone ever just stand up and admit that algo driven feeds fail because they can never really know what it is that we want to see at any given moment?
Please Twitter, wake up and learn how to be a product and user experience focused entity.
I hope that 2015 brings a new CEO to Twitter before it completely turns into another Facebook – one that already has lost its cool factor.
