Are we overreacting to Twitter’s latest blog post, or are retweets-as-faves here to stay?

fail-whale-Twitter

Twitter’s latest “news” has been met with some confusion. I put the word news in quotes because I’m not entirely convinced it’s news at all, but other people disagree.

A vaguely worded blog post about the company’s recent timeline experimentation has sparked new fears that faves-as-retweets, and other posts from people you don’t follow, are now a permanent part of Twitter. The post, titled “The spirit of experimentation and the evolution of your home timeline,” read like an explainer blog for users. But buried towards the bottom, it said “These experiments now inform the timeline you see today.”

Many, understandably, read that to mean that Twitter is officially introducing these experiments to a wider audience. The Washington Post said, “Get ready for Tweets from people you don’t follow. Twitter thinks you’ll like them.” PC World said, “Twitter veers into Facebook territory with curated timelines for everyone.” The Guardian said, “The social network has confirmed that it’s no longer an experiment: it’s a standard feature.”

Sources familiar with the company’s strategy told me that’s not entirely true. The blended content experiment started a month or so ago around the time everyone starting complaining about faves-as-retweets. Nothing has changed since then. But Twitter wanted to better explain the philosophy of those experiments for the user, which led to today’s blog post.

The company is playing with these new tools and will continue to evolve or remove them over time.

As many, including our own Mathew Ingram, have explored, Twitter threatens its core product with newsfeed experimentation. The reason people use Twitter is because it can surface real-time or unexpected information in a way a curated feed like Facebook’s can’t. And as information studies professor Zeynep Tufekci explained, some of Twitter’s experiments meddle with the “social signaling” of the the product, fundamentally changing the way people use certain tools on it to communicate.

At the same time, what choice does Twitter have? It’s a public company now, answering to shareholders, and slowing user growth isn’t acceptable. To expand, the product will naturally have to change. And as much as Twitter power users think such changes will destroy the application, it may be the very tools that make new audiences interested.

It’s a fine line to straddle, between pissing off the people who made the company what it is versus attracting new users. Tufekci has some suggestions on less dramatic and destructive ways Twitter could help new people get started, like offering lists of suggested people that users could follow in one click.

But for now, it looks like Twitter has preferred to experiment with the feed itself.

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