This week, a new feature on Twitter called Topics will start appearing on the platform allowing people to follow subjects like following accounts.
Rob Bishop, Head of Twitter Topics, told The Verge that he hopes this new update will make the application more approachable and make it easier to explore new accounts.
“We know that the main reason that people come to Twitter is to keep up on the things that they’re interested in,” he said in the interview.
“The challenge is it’s really quite difficult to do that on Twitter day to day.”
I talked with Twitter’s @rob_bishop about the launch of Topics, a potentially radical reinvention of the timeline that’s starting to roll out today https://t.co/80xFARlxQX pic.twitter.com/oLEp1OF1wq
— Casey Newton (@CaseyNewton) November 6, 2019
There will be more than 300 topics that users can choose from with this update. Currently, Twitter is testing out broader subjects like “Comedy” and “Entertainment” but they will later expand into more specific ones.
In the new system, “Topic” tweets are first scanned for keywords and then the user’s credibility is measured to see if they regularly tweet about the topic.
Lastly, their engagement is checked to see if many people are liking and retweeting. There’s a better chance to appear more regularly if the engagement is higher.All Topic tweets will be made clear with a keyword pinned to it.
Other future features that Twitter is considering are the options to mute Topics and “narrow-casting” tweets to people who follow a particular subjects.
The end goal is to improve Twitter’s algorithm and the platform engagement, Rob Bishop told The Verge.
“As with any machine learning problem, we learn the most from putting this in customers’ hands, and seeing what they engage with so we can build better models,” He said.
“Our goal is to get this out as quickly as possible and get people using it so we can improve our algorithms.”
This new Twitter update is said to be made available on all devices by Nov 13.
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