Twitter has revealed that it has finally debuted the much anticipated feature While You Were Away for its iOS application. The feature is designed to recap all the tweets you might have missed while you were away and not using the app on your smartphone.
With the help of the While You Were Away feature, instead of just seeing a chronological list of the most recent tweets, you will be displayed the top tweets since the last time you opened your Twitter app. The algorithm draws its information from your own personal engagement and other habits you may have while using the Twitter app. Yes, it learns what you like, who you like, who you’re interested in and what your preferences are when it comes to tweets.
While You Were Away was announced in November of 2014, but it only started rolling out at the beginning of January of 2015. Its goal is to present top tweets to the user that otherwise would have been lost among the plethora of new tweets.
While You Were Away does sound a bit like Facebook’s way of showing you posts, but it is completely different, said Kevin Weil, Twitter Vice President. He revealed that Twitter’s feed will focus on real-time experiences, as opposed to Facebook, which focuses more on chronology.
Naturally, the change will mostly affect those who don’t use the Twitter app frequently. This was also confirmed during the company’s announcement of While You Were Away. So, the more time you spend on the app, the less tweets this feature will draw from, but conversely, the more time you spend away from it, the more tweets it will draw from.
Twitter’s blog post about the announcement of While You Were Away said:
If you check in on Twitter now and then for a quick snapshot of what’s happening, you’ll see this recap more often; if you spend a lot of time on Twitter already, you’ll see it less.
At the moment the While You Were Away feature is only available for iOS users, but Twitter said that it plans to expand the rollout to Android quite soon. In case you don’t like the feature, you should know that there is no way to turn it off, but if you dismiss it enough times, it will appear less often.
Image Source: Twitter