CHENNAI: Popular social media platform, Twitter, changed the way timelines are updated leaving the social media abuzz, with the irate tweeple cooking the bluebird and its widely popular co-founder-CEO, Jack Dorsey for what they alleged as interference into their personal affairs.
In the new scheme of things, you will start getting the most popular – trending – tweets on the timeline rather than the minute-by-minute tweet from everyone on your twitter feed as it has been all this while.
According to the micro blogging company, this would help reduce clutter.
This is not entirely new: it was earlier offered as ‘show me the best tweets’. That was different because it was an option you may choose. Or, like in most cases, not. But now, the algorithmic timeline is planned to be the default setting.
There is a choice to opt out of this new setting and return to the original twitterverse of incessant, random, but that has not prevented any from venting out their fury. They have done what any angry tweeple would do in all such cases – formed a hashtag #RIPtwitter.
The threat they are holding out is clear: it is the un-spiced/spliced/spiked flow of news, views, comments, reactions, opinions that make the microblogging platform fun, without which there is no point being there. One of the most pointed criticism heard repeatedly was that Twitter was turning into Facebook – because, you know, Facebook is the evil one that flouts your privacy. Jack Dorsey did try to douse the fire, tweeting that there was option to “refresh back to live.”
But, it has not worked so far. Unsurprising, as all such ‘outrages’ take time to heal.
Meanwhile, some of the more active ones, intelligent among the Chennai tweeple had this to share:
“For people running handles that give out information periodically like real time weather, traffic and services updates, chronological ordering of tweets would make more sense,” said Srikanth, one of the admins of the twitter handle @Chennairains.
“Let’s see and find out first, instead of hyperventilating about a feature we have no idea about,” said Krish Ashok, a popular blogger, musician and IT consultant.