Twitter has announced that it will launch a new feature that allows up to 300 topics such as sports and entertainment to be followed as well as users on the social network and will be available from next November 13 globally for iOS and Android devices and in its web version
The ‘Topics’ function allows you to follow topics in the same way that until now you can follow users in order to make the platform closer to new and intermittent users and facilitate the discovery of more frequent users. new accounts and threads, as announced by the executives of the social network to The Verge media.
This new function will allow up to 300 different topics on sports and entertainment to be followed, “but it will be extended to more global issues week by week,” Twitter confirmed in a statement sent to Europa Press.
One of the issues that will not be found will be the politician, at least in this first launch group, as confirmed by the company to The Verge, for the sensitive nature of its content.
In this way, the user will have to find a topic that interests him to follow, and once he does, all the ‘tweets’ that are published on the topic will appear in his ‘timeline’ as until now those of the other accounts that appear Follow on the social network. Thus, users will be able to see tweets from people they don’t follow, but who are interested in the same topic as them.
“We know that the main reason why people come to Twitter is to follow the thread of the things in which they are interested,” said the director of the ‘Topics’ team, Rob Bishop, in an interview with The Verge, apostilling that “the challenge is that it is really quite difficult to do that on Twitter every day.”
The process that the social network carries out to select the ‘tweets’ on a topic that the user follows in order to appear on their ‘timeline’ is born with the Twitter scanning of all the ‘tweets’ of the platform which include the keywords related to this topic, as Bishop told the media. At the moment, these terms are only associated with texts, they cannot be found in images or videos.
Next, Twitter looks for whether the ‘tweet’ has been generated by someone who ‘tweets’ on that topic regularly, as a credibility measure. And finally, they observe the level of participation, that is, how many have given ‘likes’, ‘retweeted’ or answered some tweet.
Bishop, in addition, confirmed to the media that, generally, the fewer user accounts the user follows, the more ‘tweets’ of ‘Topics’ he is likely to see, although he states that if the function succeeds the trend of the average user will be the to follow more individual accounts.
A FUNCTION TO SILENCE THE ‘TOPICS’
The director of the ‘Topics’ team has also confirmed to The Verge that they are working on an option that allows them to silence the ‘topics’ to prevent, for example, some user from encountering a ‘spoiler’ on a popular series.
In addition, it ensures that they work in a function that allows transmitting a ‘tweet’ to the followers of a specific topic, and in another that allows to explore ‘topics’ on the web and see them in a list.
The tool began its test phase last August and will be launched globally on November 13 for Android, iOS and web devices, as confirmed by the social network.
