Are the Social Mediums losing identity? It looks like the answer is yes. After a few attempts by Facebook and Twitter to copy each other, Twitter may well be shedding its tag as being non-intrusive medium as it will now show up tweets from people whom you don’t follow.

The Twitter is changing its central logic and now users will see tweets that Twitter considers as most popular or most relevant to you. This comes a few days after the social media decided to show the Tweets tagged as favorite in your timeline.

About showing up the tweets from users not followed by you, Twitter explains in its support page: “Additionally, when we identify a Tweet, an account to follow, or other content that's popular or relevant, we may add it to your timeline. This means you will sometimes see Tweets from accounts you don't follow. We select each Tweet using a variety of signals, including how popular it is and how people in your network are interacting with it. Our goal is to make your home timeline even more relevant and interesting.”

This may well be one of tectonic shifts in Twitter’s policy as it seeks to attract new users. This move is very similar to what Facebook did with its News feed where a like by a friend started showing up on your feed.

Is it a gamble?

Yes it looks like a huge gamble on the part of Twitter. Most of the Twitter users have started considering it as personal, taking special care in maintaining their timeline and this move has already created an outrage.

While this might affect the regular surfer, who just uses Twitter to get information there are still a majority who spend a lot of time in maintaining a clean image of their timeline. Just like a gardener, who takes great care in pruning the plans and maintaining the shape, they spend a lot of time looking at whom they follow and what their timeline looks like. This might go for a toss if Twitter starts showing up unwanted tweets.

Meanwhile, the whole meaning of favorite will also be lost. Earlier it was a personal way of telling that they liked the tweet, with its present change it will become another form of retweeting. With this the whole meaning of the button itself is lost.

While the change is always good and important to survive, the proposed changes means that what we called once Twitter no longer exists. May be the next generation of users will get used to it, while the older struggle to cope up with it. 

Tags : Twitter