Keeping up with Twitter can be quite a challenge. The 140-character social network moves at a rapid pace, especially during significant news events. I only follow a few hundred people, but that usually translates into about 1,500 tweets per day. Twitter wants to make that more bearable by showing users of its mobile apps some of the top performing tweets from their network that popped up while they weren’t paying attention.
Users of the company’s iOS app will start seeing recaps pop up with the heading “While you were away…” after they’ve avoided the social network for a while. (The feature will be rolling out on Android and the web “soon.”) It’s designed to catch up people who pop in and out of Twitter, so prolific users will see fewer of these recaps than more casual tweeters.
It’s another move by the social networking company to move the service away from its roots of just displaying a timeline of content from accounts people are following. Twitter’s user growth has slowed over the past year, and investors are pressuring the company to do something to draw in more people. This is one way to try and make the service more palatable and easier to understand for people who don’t innately click with Twitter’s concept.
