Twitter announced back in November that it intends to boost user engagement with a plethora of new features. One of those promised features, a “While you were away” recap of all of the tweets that you missed while you were AFK, appears to have started rolling out to a bunch of users. While it isn’t live a the moment, the fact that so many people have received the feature indicates that a full rollout is imminent.
After a year of slowing user growth and shaky investor confidence, Twitter executives are well aware that a solid performance over the next 12 months is crucial to the company’s long-term success. Ever since the microblogging service landed in 2006, Twitter developers have been tinkering with the site, rolling out various features and tools in a bid to retain existing users and attract new ones. While some of these features end up fully incorporated into the service, others, rejected by its user base or unable to achieve their planned goal, have fallen by the wayside. The latest change to Twitter is designed to help users discover important or relevant tweets that they might’ve missed while away from the site. First discussed a couple of months back, the ‘while you were away’ feature, which is now being rolled out to all users, places ‘interesting’ tweets at the top of a user’s timeline.