Twitter’s New “While You Were Away” Feature Has Started Rolling Out

This past November, Twitter announced plans to implement several new initiatives intended to boost user engagement. One of these new features, a “While you were away” recap of Tweets that you might have missed, has started rolling out to a large number of users. While Twitter hasn’t yet announced the launch of this new feature, the fact that a significant number of accounts are seeing it suggests that a full rollout will be coming soon.

The new “While you were away” offering works in a similar way to Facebook’s Timeline, marking the first major non-chronological feature to be added to Twitter. Back in November when it first announced this upcoming functionality, the company explained that it would look at the “best” Tweets from a user’s network since they last opened Twitter, and subsequently display them at the top of their timeline to ensure they don’t miss them. “Every time you open the Twitter app, you’ll see something great,” explained Twitter.

The social media giant announced its upcoming “Instant Timeline” feature in November as well, which is intended to make it easier for new users to enjoy Twitter right away by supplying a full feed of interesting content to them before they start following anyone. There hasn’t been an announcement yet about when this functionality will begin to roll out.

A significant number of Twitter users are reporting seeing the “While you were away” function in their accounts, with mixed reactions ranging from positive to negative. A crucial aspect of this function is how the algorithm determines what constitutes the “best” Tweets a user will see in the recap. There are already some other services that provide this functionality to users, such as Nuzzel, which taps into a user’s Facebook and Twitter networks to display news stories and other posts that are popular with the people that they are connected to.

Will Twitter’s new feature work as well as or better than other existing services? Some industry insiders have expressed skepticism due to the fact that Twitter can only serve up individual Tweets, which take up limited space at the top of a user’s feed. Conversely, some users are already writing about how much they enjoy this new feature, and Twitter is certainly glad to be seeing some positive initial feedback. It will be interesting to watch user’s reactions as the feature is rolled out on a wider scale in the coming period.