Twitter’s timeline option puts important tweets up top

Twitter is doing its best to make sure you see the best content in your timeline. At least that’s what it’s hoping it’s doing with today’s announcement of a new timeline option. The new feature drops what Twitter determines are the best tweets at the top of your timeline. Now before you lose your mind, the feature is opt-in and even if you turn it on today, the company is slowly roll it out so it might take weeks before you see the new feature.

The new nameless-feature algorithmically determines which tweets are important to you (based on who you follow and engage with) and moves them to the top of your timeline when you open the app or launch the site. The featured updates will be presented in reverse chronological order in case you were worried Twitter was turning into Facebook. Twitter is hoping this will keep you from missing important updates. Michelle Haq, Twitter timeline project manager told Engadget, “we realized there’s a ton of great content on Twitter and it’s not always easy to find that great content.”

While this seems like a super-charged version of While You Were Away, Haq insists that they are two different features. “While You Were Away only shows when you been away for a very long time,” Haq told Engadget. While this new timeline feature will be there whenever you open the app or load the site. After a quick refresh, the timeline goes back to showing all your full timeline in reverse chronological order.