We all know Twitter has been experimenting with showing you tweets from people you don't follow, but now it's confirmed that it's a standard feature.
The company claims it's to help you find who to follow.
"Choosing who to follow is a great first step – in many cases, the best tweets come from people you already know, or know of," Trevor O'Brien from Twitter's product team explained in a blog post entitled The Spirit of Experimentation and the Evolution of Your Home Timeline. "But there are times when you might miss out on tweets we think you'd enjoy.
"To help you keep up with what's happening, we've been testing ways to include these tweets in your timeline – ones we think you'll find interesting or entertaining."
If someone you follow favourites a tweet from someone you don't follow, it will show up in your timeline, even though they didn't retweet it.
Twitter claims it's bringing you more interesting tweets, but critics say it's ruining the experience by giving you less control over what you see.
O'Brien claims feedback has been positive. "Testing indicates that most people enjoy seeing tweets from accounts they may not follow, based on signals such as activity from accounts you do follow, the popularity of the tweets, and how people in your network interact with them."
Twitter recently introduced Audio Cards that let you play music and other audio from within a tweet by pressing the play button. To enable this, it partnered with SoundCloud.
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