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Twitter rolls out weekly e-mail digest of tweets, stories

E-mail contains list of "most relevant" tweets and stories shared by the people users follow, along with links and various tweeting features.

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Edward Moyer is a senior editor at CNET and a many-year veteran of the writing and editing world. He enjoys taking sentences apart and putting them back together. He also likes making them from scratch. ¶ For nearly a quarter of a century, he's edited and written stories about various aspects of the technology world, from the US National Security Agency's controversial spying techniques to historic NASA space missions to 3D-printed works of fine art. Before that, he wrote about movies, musicians, artists and subcultures.
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Twitter's new weekly e-mail digest. Twitter

Twitter has begun sending users a weekly e-mail digest of the "most relevant" tweets and stories shared by the people they follow.

The introduction of the feature comes a few months after Twitter acquired Summify, a startup that gathered news from a user's various social networks and compiled it in daily e-mails. The Summify team moved from Vancouver to Twitter's headquarters in San Francisco.

In a blog post today, Twitter said stories in the e-mail are presented much like they are under the Discover tab on the Twitter site. That is, there's a headline, a summary, and then a row of thumbnails that shows who tweeted the story. Users can click the headline to read the story, check out related tweets from the people they follow, and click a link in the e-mail to tweet the piece themselves.

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Tweets are displayed as they are on Twitter, and the e-mail includes tweets that captured the imagination of those a user follows, even if the user doesn't follow the person who actually sent the tweet. You can see who among your followees retweeted or favorited those tweets, and retweet, favorite, reply to, or read the chatter around them yourself as well.

"We're rolling out this new e-mail to everyone over the next few weeks, so keep checking your inbox for new messages from Twitter," Othman Laraki, Twitter's director of Growth and International, wrote in the blog post. "Like other Twitter e-mail notifications, you can manage your preferences for this new digest in your notification settings."

Earlier this month, on the day the Discovery tab was announced, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo confirmed that "onboarding" new users was a continuing challenge, saying it's difficult to show them the benefit of the platform. "We need to make it super simple and dead easy for both our existing users and users new to the platform," he said at the time.