Facebook Style Filtered Feed Coming to Twitter

Mathew Ingram, writing for Gigaom:

Earlier this year, when Twitter released its quarterly financial results, CEO Dick Costolo was asked whether the platform would ever implement a Facebook-style filtering algorithm, he hedged his answer by saying he wouldn’t “rule it out.” According to some recent comments from chief financial officer Anthony Noto, however, the company is doing a lot more than not ruling it out — it sounds like a done deal.

Inserting tweets into my timeline from people I don't follow is annoying, but removing tweets from it is intolerable. I know we've made fusses about Twitter before, and made what ultimately turned out to be empty threats to leave, but as Ingram notes, something like this changes the very core of the Twitter experience.

Protesting Twitter for its politics is noble, but that kind of thing is hard to get support for since most people won't care (▼)(▲)Or at the very least they won't care enough to inconvenience themselves by finding a new home for their social media posts.. If Twitter ceases to be Twitter though, that strikes me as a far stronger opportunity for disruption.

Hopefully if they do ship this feature it will remain optional instead of being forced on us, but I wouldn't count on that. If I am manhandled into a filtered stream, I'll be on the lookout for a more successful App.net.