Twitter’s ‘While You Were Away’ Summary Feature Is Rolling Out Widely

A few weeks ago, we wrote that some Twitter users were starting to see a new “While you were away” feature in their feeds. Now, the social media giant has made an official announcement that this functionality is being rolled out for all users across its apps and website.

The “While you were away” feature provides users with a summary of Tweets that they may have missed since they last logged in. It works in a similar way to Facebook’s “Top Stories,” which ranks status updates based on their importance as opposed to in a strictly reverse chronological order.

“A lot can happen while you’re on the go,” wrote Twitter in its blog post announcement. “To fill in some of those gaps, we will surface a few of the best Tweets you probably wouldn’t have seen otherwise, determined by engagement and other factors. 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.”

The blog post continued by explaining that these recaps, marked with a “While you were away” heading, have started to appear for all iOS users and will be rolling out to its Android app and website soon.

Twitter is well known for providing a real-time experience, and this new feature marks a departure from this idea. However, one detail that’s unclear is exactly how the system determines the Tweets that should be included in the summary. Still, when users scroll down the page, they will continue to see the reverse chronological timeline that they have come to expect.

Why is Twitter moving in this direction? It is likely due to the fact that the social media company is not growing as quickly as some may have expected. This past November, company executives stated that they would be taking measures to improve the user experience, particularly for users who are either new to Twitter or those who only use their accounts sporadically. While this is an understandable move for the social media company, some regular Twitter users may be unhappy with this change, as it appears to be going in the direction of Facebook and may continue down that road. Will Twitter take this idea further in the future by using engagement signals to drastically reorder its feeds? There’s a great deal of speculation throughout the industry, with some in favor of this move and some vehemently opposed to it.

At least for now, this is only a small step in that direction. Twitter’s VP of Product, Kevin Weil, told the New York Times that the company has no intention to change Twitter’s reverse chronological order in general. “This is not a move to a fully ranked timeline,” Weil said. “You’re going to see us continue to focus on real-time experiences.”

It’s certainly an interesting move for Twitter, and we’ll be watching to see how users react to this new feature as it rolls out widely. Will the “While you were away” functionality simply be an additional tool, or does this mark the beginning of a continuing move by Twitter in the direction of engagement based feeds?