If you don’t spend time searching or browsing Twitter on a regular basis, you’re bound to miss tweets about subjects that interest you, especially if the people you follow aren’t tweeting about your points of concern. This means that Twitter’s timeline is all too often filled with irrelevant tweets that focus on elements that are topical to the individuals on your timeline, & often not what you’re looking to see. Twitter is all too aware of this problem & to combat it, it is launching a feature known as ‘Topics’.
Twitter Topics are simply what the name implies, users will be able to select from 300 viral ‘tags’ to curate a far more meaningful & relevant feed. Topics will allow users to view Tweets from people they don’t follow if the subject matter concerns an item they’re following. This makes so much sense, & Twitter has been working on various algorithms over the years to perfect this functionality. However, although it has employed machine learning in this endeavor, every algorithm has fallen short of its objectives — consider ‘Moments’ from a few years ago, which was meant to allow users to follow events they were interested in. The feature didn’t last long.
So what’s special about ‘Topics’, & why does Twitter believe that this could be a better service? The answer is that Twitter has employed a whole new editorial team of ‘real humans’ to ensure that ‘Topics’ contain meaningful content that users will want to see.
Subjects put forward for users to follow include comedy, sport, celebrities & many others, the most notable exception being politics, which Twitter is hoping to avoid, due to current controversies. To follow a topic, go to your ‘Home’ page & in ‘Search’ you’ll find a list of items to follow, click on those you’re interested in & voila, a new set of tweets from people you don’t follow will appear if they’re on topic.
Currently, the fewer individuals you follow, the more ‘Topics’ you’re going to see. Twitter hopes that this new service will improve both user engagement & satisfaction. Twitter will also show you tweets from ‘Topics’ its team think you might be interested in, based on your interests. However, if you find that you’re bombarded with irrelevant Content, you can disable the ‘Topic’ on your ‘Home’ screen to make it disappear.
With millions of users looking for relevance & Twitter going all out to provide it, Topics should see user numbers increasing in the near future.
