Twitter Debuts New 'Recap' Feature That Makes It Feel More Like Facebook It's meant to help you catch up on the most popular and relevant tweets you may have missed since you last signed onto the platform.
By Laura Entis •
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While Facebook is a curated garden, showing you posts it deems most relevant, Twitter is more like a river: You can always get your feet wet, but it's virtually impossible to keep up with the inundation of tweets streaming through the network in real-time.
Now, however, Twitter has launched a new Recap "while you were away" feature. The purpose is to highlight tweets it deems particularly relevant (determined by "engagement and other factors") that you may have missed when you stepped away from the micro-blogging site. The number of curated tweets you'll see each time you check in depends on the amount of time you typically spend on – and away from – the platform. "If you check in on Twitter now and then for a quick snapshot of what's happening, you'll see this recap more often," Twitter wrote in a post announcing the feature. "If you spend a lot of time on Twitter already, you'll see it less."
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The Recap feature has already rolled out on Twitter's iOS app and will come to Android and web versions in the next couple weeks.
For now, it appears there's no way to turn off the feature, although if you frequently dismiss highlighted tweets, you'll be shown them less often, according to The New York Times.
Unlike Facebook, where chronology plays only one part in a host of factors that ultimately decide which posts you see, Twitter has always treated chronology as sacrosanct (hence your Twitter stream is a "timeline.") With the rollout of the Recap feature, Twitter is experimenting with ways to highlight important information a la Facebook while maintaining its real-time immediacy.
