Twitter Aims to Lower Its Learning Curve by Automatically Filling Your Feed

Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

Now that Twitter is a public company, it’s under added pressure to expand the reach of its microblogging service. And so far, that’s been tough going.

But last week, according to The New York Times , the company began rolling out a new tool meant to make its service more accessible to new users. It’s called Instant Timeline, and as the Times reports, it’s now available to a small percentage of Twitter users on Android phones.

The idea is that when you sign up for a new account, Twitter scans your smartphone contact list for people with Twitter accounts, analyzes their Twitter behavior, and then uses this analysis to automatically fill your Twitter feed with tweets from other people you might be interested in. This might include experts in a certain field, news outlets, the mayor of your city, celebrities of interest, and more.

Traditionally, your feed would only include tweets from people you actively choose to “follow.” Now, it will include all sorts of other tweets as well. In a way, it breaks the original Twitter model, but the hope is that it can reduce what has traditionally been a steep learning curve for the service—something that has hindered Twitter in its ongoing efforts to expand its user base and compete with the likes of Facebook.

The new Instant Timeline also helps new users navigate Twitter’s interface, providing tutorials at certain points throughout the service to explain tricky features, like direct messaging. And it arrives at a crucial time for Twitter. The company, which went public in November 2013, has been facing investor concerns over the social network’s slow growth and declining user engagement.

Though the social network did see more user sign-ups in 2014 than a year ago, according to a recent survey from the Pew Research Center, it saw less engagement from those users overall. Only 36 percent of Twitter users visited the site every day in 2014, a significant drop from 46 percent of users who peeked into their timelines daily in 2013.