Anyone who has created a Twitter account knows how difficult it can be to get value from the service. When you sign up, you have to “follow” dozens of people and organizations on the service and then hope they post items that actually interest you, since that is all you are going to see.
Everything in the feed, or timeline, is presented in reverse chronological order, with no easy way to find the diamonds among the dross. And good luck figuring out the weird protocols of the social network, such as how to reply to a Twitter message privately instead of to the whole world.
Twitter knows that its design is a big hurdle for growth. In November, the company promised investors that it would soon introduce an “instant timeline” feature that would give new users great content pulled from the social network without going through the traditional setup process.
The instant timeline entered public testing last week, and I had the chance to try it.
While the feature doesn’t solve all of Twitter’s interface problems, there is no question that it’s a huge improvement to the sign-up process. Setting up an account is quick and nearly painless, and you are then plunged into Twitter’s information stream.
The first part of the sign-up process is unchanged. After you pick a user name and password, Twitter asks for access to your smartphone’s contact list. Once you grant that access, the service scans it for people with Twitter accounts and suggests them as people to follow.
Traditionally, whomever you choose to follow at that stage determines what you see on the service. Pick two accounts, for example, and you see every message from those two but nothing else.
But with the instant timeline, you don’t need to follow anyone.
Twitter analyzes your contacts and uses information like who they are and who they follow on Twitter to guess which accounts and topics might interest you. It then shows you those tweets in your feed. So if your friends are foodies, you will see items about recipes and food trends. If they are football lovers or fans of Ellen DeGeneres, you will see National Football League video highlights and tweets from comic actors.
The result is a timeline of (hopefully) compelling tweets without your needing to follow a single account.
In my case, the algorithm was eerily accurate at divining my interests. It pulled up tweets by journalists, technology luminaries and news outlets that I regularly follow. But it also added the accounts of San Francisco’s mayor, the comedians David Letterman and Jimmy Kimmel, and the celebrity chef Thomas Keller — people I don’t follow but probably should.
Still, it wasn’t perfect. It showed me a lot of basketball and tennis tweets, for example, even though I don’t care much about either sport. (I suspect it was because some of my contacts are passionate fans.) And a lot of brand tweets showed up, looking suspiciously like advertising.
Over all, however, the quality of the instant timeline was so good that I was almost tempted to dump my regular Twitter account, where I follow more than 700 other accounts, probably one-third of which are no longer important to me.
That isn’t quite what Twitter has in mind. The company says the power of Twitter comes from fine-tuning it to follow the people and topics that you are most interested in.
The instant timeline has frequent reminders urging you to follow people, including one that stayed at the top of my feed for quite a while. It also has built-in tutorials at strategic points to explain concepts like direct messaging.
The idea is that as a new user becomes more familiar with the service and chooses more accounts to follow, the instant timeline will include less material picked by Twitter’s algorithms. Eventually, the person will end up with a regular Twitter feed.
Twitter, which faces intense pressure from Wall Street to accelerate its rate of user growth, is betting that the instant timeline will make the service far more appealing to new users. But it will be months before anyone knows whether it will have a significant impact.
The feature appeared to a small percentage of new users signing up on Android phones last week. If the initial testing goes well, the company plans to expand it, with the goal of making an instant timeline the standard experience for all new users within a few months.
Given Twitter’s longstanding reluctance to show people a flow of information selected by a computer algorithm — a technique Facebook uses to great effect — the instant timeline is as much a psychological breakthrough as a technical one.
The company is also taking other steps in that direction. A couple of weeks ago, it began offering iPhone users a recap of top tweets they missed while they were away from the service. And it will soon start showing a selection of top content to people visiting the Twitter.com home page, without the current requirement that you must have an account to see anything.
With all of these moves, Twitter is finally acknowledging that whatever its value as a global, real-time, public information service, most people are too lazy or harried to invest time navigating its complexities until they know it is really useful to them.