Four days after Chief Executive Officer Jack swore that Twitter, Inc. has no intention to implement an algorithmic timeline this week, Twitter has launched an algorithmic timeline.

Dubbed by the company as an “improved timeline,” the new service is promoted as a way to “help people see Tweets that are important to them — from their favorite athletes, musicians, politicians, or brands.”

As suspected, the new timeline will mean that instead of immediately seeing tweets in reverse chronological order when logging in, users will instead see tweets Twitter believes they want to see; the normal list of tweets in reverse chronological is still available but is now relegated to further down the page.

Tweets that are pushed to the top under the new system are delivered based on a users’ past Twitter activity to predict which Tweets they might like to see most, with Twitter’s algorithms taking into account people they interact with, tweets they engage with, interests, and what’s going on in their network.

In a positive move the algorithmic timeline is, at least for now, completely optional and is not being forced on users, who have to opt-in to see it, although then confusingly in a separate announcement Twitter suggests that it may be forced on users in the future, saying that after  a period of testing “we’ll be listening to your feedback and making it even better over time…then we’ll be turning on the feature for you in coming weeks — look out for a notification in your timeline,” which sounds a lot like it becoming opt-out.

Business angle?

Of interest is that Twitter seems to be pitching the changes at business as being a better way for users to see their content, suggesting that what many may see at the top of their new timelines isn’t content Twitter thinks they want to see, but content that advertisers have paid good money to have placed there.

“Brands that create quality content have always performed well on Twitter. With this update,
whether it comes from an SMB, large brand, consumer, or athlete you follow, the best content shines through,” Twitter notes. “We’ve noticed in our early experiments that people who have this experience turned on Tweet and Retweet more on Twitter — and we believe this means that brands can reach a more engaged potential audience. Throughout our tests, we also saw an increase in engagement for brands’ organic Tweets and an increase in engagement for Tweets about live events.”

Whatever the real reason for the change, one thing does come clearly from today’s announcement: Jack Dorsey is a liar, and anything he says publicly in the future will immediately be doubted.

 Image credit: tcdisrupt/Flickr/CC by 2.0