Twitter Now Helps You Catch Up on Missed Tweets

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With a new feature from Twitter called Recap, users can see tweets they missed since they last logged on to the social network.Credit

Twitter prides itself on being a real-time information service. If something big is going on right now, more and more people will post messages about it, and eventually the news will find its way into your Twitter feed.

That’s the theory, at least. But what if you’re not logged into Twitter during, say, the Super Bowl, and want to catch up the next day on the best or most popular tweets about the game or the advertisers?

Good luck finding the good stuff amid the millions of messages posted during and around the game.

On Wednesday, Twitter announced a new feature, called Recap, that takes a step toward addressing that problem. At the top of your feed, you will see three great tweets you missed since you last logged on to the social network. The feature is being added to Twitter’s iPhone app immediately, and will be extended to Android and web versions in coming weeks.

Kevin Weil, Twitter’s vice president of product, said that the idea is to help you find the best of what you missed, whether it has been a day or just an hour since you last checked the service.

“The first thing that you will see when you open Twitter is a quick recap of the most engaging tweets that happened while you were away,” he said in an interview. “And then we’ll go right back of course after that to the normal content.”

With Recap, Twitter is delivering on one of the promises it made to investors in November, when it previewed the “while you were away” idea along with other user improvements

The broad goal of Recap and other coming changes, said Mr. Weil, is that every time you use Twitter, it should “tell you what’s happening in the world and your world.”

Another improvement promised in November — an instant feed of interesting content presented to new users so they don’t have to immediately dive into Twitter’s system of following accounts — is also coming soon.

Twitter has long considered its core design of a stream of tweets, presented newest first, to be so sacred that it has even incorporated that into the name of the stream: the timeline.

So showing tweets chosen for their importance, not time of posting, is an acknowledgment that most people would like some help sorting through that stream.

Twitter’s archrival, Facebook, downplays chronology entirely, sorting its feed of items based mostly on social signals like how many of your friends are sharing or commenting on an item and how often you personally interact with the person posting it.

Twitter is going to use similar signals to choose the items for each person’s Recap, although Mr. Weil bristled at the comparison to Facebook. “This is not a move to a fully ranked timeline,” he said. “You’re going to see us continue to focus on real-time experiences.”

It’s hard to tell how well Recap sniffs out the best tweets, since it has only been in limited testing until this point. (The first reports of the tests surfaced in December, but I was not given a preview of the service.)

At this point Twitter does not plan to give its 284 million monthly users direct control over Recap. They can’t choose how many items they see, they can’t pull up Recap on demand to see the best tweets of, say, the last 12 hours, and they can’t tell Recap that they are more interested in tweets about technology than sports.

Users won’t even be able to turn off Recap, although if they dismiss it enough times by hitting the X at the top of the summary, the system will show recaps less frequently.

But for Twitter, which has been battling slow user growth, recapping the past is leading the way into the future.