Twitter's big new update will suck you into news
More news, less hate?
Twitter is still figuring out how to remove the poison from parts of its social network, but the company also wants you to focus on the good -- and today, it's announcing a whole bunch of changes that could make it easier to follow live news events on the platform, including the World Cup.
In short:
- Breaking news and "personalized news" tweets will start popping up at the top of your timeline.
- You'll start getting "personalized news notifications" (but you can turn them off).
- You'll see "related news" at the top of your search results.
- You'll be able to swipe through Moments -- collections of Tweets, photos and videos about news events -- vertically instead of horizontally.
- In the United States, Moments may have multiple different timelines to swipe through now (e.g. one with tweets you may have missed, another with new tweets, another with commentary).
- There's a new dedicated World Cup page that includes multiple timelines ("recap" and "latest") and the current scores right now.
The update "really gets closer to what Twitter wants to be," tweeted Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.
An example of a personalized news notification.
Which makes it sound like Twitter wants to be more of a news app, and less of a social network. These updates could add up to a lot more news in people's feeds.
Some of these additions are rolling out over the coming weeks, and others in the coming months. And apparently there's more to come. In a tweetstorm you should probably read, Twitter's Sriram Krishnan says news events are "a big focus area for Twitter" and we should expect to see more.
