Are we about to see the end of the unfiltered stream?
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Twitter is out of options — except for one big one.
In the nearly two years since its November 2013 initial public offering, Twitter has tried seemingly everything to grow without alienating its loyal-until-death group of core users. It's made itself more visual by expanding images by default. It's quashed the "RT" in favor of the simpler quoted tweet. It's introduced autoplay video. It's added an e-commerce layer by giving brands the option to sell products straight from tweets with a "Buy" button. It killed a confusing rule preventing people from sending direct messages to folks who don't follow them. And it's extended the character limit for those messages to 1,000 characters from 140.
In other words, Twitter has done nearly everything it can to refine and enhance the way tweets present information, without touching the order in which they're published. That order -- chronological, with no algorithm elevating the "best" tweets -- has long been sacred ground for the company. The order is cherished by Twitter's core users, with many arguing its organic surfacing of news and conversation is what makes Twitter work. But with every other card on the table and Twitter's Wall Street masters still unhappy, the company's last remaining move may be the one it's long avoided: the application of an algorithm, or code, that decides which tweets get shown and which don't. The end of the order.
"It's not an easy task, but I think it's a necessary task," Nate Elliott, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, told BuzzFeed News. "If they implement an algorithm properly, it could be the savior of their platform."
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