Twitter is planning to pre-populate the timelines of new users with tweets from interesting accounts, in a bid to help them to become accustomed with the social network.
For the first time, newbies will not be required to seek out new accounts to follow as soon as they sign up to the service.
This may help to lower the entry level for those bracing the social network and perhaps encourage them to stick with Twitter for longer.
It is not clear how Twitter will determine how to populate the timelines of users but it seems reasonable to suggest new users will be polled about their interests during the sign-up process.
The change in tact was announced by Twitter’s Dick Costolo at the company’s first investor day, as per a Wall Street Journal reporter.
Vidal Goel tweeted: “New Twitter users will get an instant timeline, no need to follow anyone, says @dickc.”
However, that’s not the switch in the cards. According to the same source, Twitter also plans to completely revamp its Direct Messages portal in early 2015.
Without elaborating, Goel added: “Major improvements to Twitter's private messaging coming this quarter.”
Murmours of a standalone Twitter messaging service have been doing the rounds for the last year or so, so perhaps Twitter plans to make messaging less of an afterthought and more of a rival to the likes of Facebook and WhatsApp.
Read more: Twitter now has 284m monthly users, but is growth strong enough?
Via: The Next Web
