Twitter Puts the Timeline on Notice and Hints of Group Chats - WSJ

An algorithm-driven content feed. A souped-up search engine. Group chatting.

These appear to be among Twitter’s priorities to make its service more relevant and easier to use, an issue that has plagued the company ever since its IPO last year.

On Wednesday, financial chief Anthony Noto offered some clues for Twitter’s product roadmap as the company looks to jumpstart user growth.

Speaking at the Citi Global Technology Conference in New York, Noto said the company’s new head of product, Daniel Graf, has made improving the service’s search capability one of his top priorities for 2015.

“If you think about our search capabilities we have a great data set of topical information about topical tweets,” Noto said. “The hierarchy within search really has to lend itself to that taxonomy.” With that comes the need for “an algorithm that delivers the depth and breadth of the content we have on a specific topic and then eventually as it relates to people,” he added.

This is related to Twitter’s larger aim to better organize its content—to separate the interesting and timely tweets from the noise. Twitter has already begun tweaking the timeline where tweets appear—most notably (and controversially), by introducing tweets from accounts users haven’t chosen to follow.

Twitter’s timeline is organized in reverse chronological order, a delivery system that has not changed since the product was created eight years ago and one that some early adopters consider sacred to the core Twitter experience. But this “isn’t the most relevant experience for a user,” Noto said. Timely tweets can get buried at the bottom of the feed if the user doesn’t have the app open, for example. “Putting that content in front of the person at that moment in time is a way to organize that content better.”

On Sunday, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo tried to explain via tweeting why users might see favorites from accounts they don’t follow. In response to tweets from users griping about the uninvited content, Costolo said that the favorited tweets by other users show up when the user pulls to refresh their timelines twice and Twitter has no new content to show both times.

Noto said these changes will be incremental. “We’re going to do all of these methodically. We test and make sure we understand what the implications are,” he said. “Individual users are not going to wake up one day and find their timeline completely ranked by an algorithm.”

The CFO also hinted that group chats might be in the pipeline. Direct messaging, Twitter’s private chat function, has traditionally been put on the backburner. Because Twitter’s service is public in nature, the role of private messaging has always been a subject of debate within the company. Over the last year, amid the explosion of messaging apps, Twitter has given direct messaging a more prominent role. Noto suggested direct messaging might become more social.

Today, users can only send a direct message to one account at a time. But if, say, Noto tweeted about a football game and a couple of his “college buddies” replied to it, “I’m not sure I want to have (that) conversation in front of my boss and the rest of the 271 global users. I might want to take that to a private setting which you can do through direct messaging. Today you can only do that one to one as opposed to one to many. So that’s an example of innovation around sharing or expression that we can pursue over time.”

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http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/09/03/twitters-product-checklist-better-search-and-group-chats/