There’s still a gap that needs to be bridged between user awareness and user engagement on Twitter, according to CEO Dick Costolo. People know about Twitter but aren’t aware of the full extent of its features. Twitter is working to address that gap with a new Discover Tab that will provide even more personalized content for users based on their social graph.
The Discover Tab will now surface tweets and content in real time that are ranked by the strength of connections between users. Discover will also take into account content shared from friends of friends. So there’s a better chance of seeing stuff that matters to you because it’s from the people you care about. The discovery service will also present stories along with the people who shared it and the other popular tweets related to it. That should help with understanding the larger conversation and context around a shared story.
That’s one of the problems with Twitter: so much happens in the flood of tweets, and there are limited ways of understanding how it all fits together. Users can also reply, retweet or favorite tweets, or add their own commentary on a story from the new Discover Tab.
The new Discover Tab, “is our opportunity to understand what’s happening on Twitter that is relevant to you,” said Costolo at the Wired Business Conference. “We think what your interests are, what’s happening on Twitter right now, we have to make it easy,” to discover that content.
This challenge for Twitter grows more pressing each day as more and more tweets flow through the platform. Costolo said that Twitter users now send 1 billion tweets every two and half days. The goal for Twitter is to ultimately bring people closer to the things they care about, said Costolo, whether it’s celebrities and heroes or friends and interests. He said that’s an ongoing challenge that will continue to be addressed through Discover and other measures.
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