Twitter to display tweets from accounts you don't follow -- like it or not

CNET

Your Twitter timeline may start to get a bit more crowded -- with uninvited guests.

Under a new plan, the microblogging site may now show you tweets from accounts that you don't follow. That's a significant change from the usual scenario in which you see only tweets from accounts you follow as well as retweets and promoted tweets.

In an update to a Help Center Page called What's a Twitter timeline?, Twitter described the timeline tweak and explained the reasoning behind it:

Additionally, when we identify a Tweet, an account to follow, or other content that's popular or relevant, we may add it to your timeline. This means you will sometimes see Tweets from accounts you don't follow. We select each Tweet using a variety of signals, including how popular it is and how people in your network are interacting with it. Our goal is to make your home timeline even more relevant and interesting.

The move has its pros and cons. You may find interesting accounts you didn't know existed. But depending on the volume of tweets from accounts you don't follow, you may find your timeline more crowded than you like. And your ability to personalize your timeline will face an added challenge since you could now bump into tweets you didn't ask for and don't like.

Some Twitter users have already chimed in with a negative reaction to the new initiative.

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One user in the UK complained after Twitter displayed a tweet to him from his stepfather, who died last June, according to The Guardian. Other users have registered more general gripes about the change, with one person tweeting: "Hey

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Twitter suspends accounts sharing beheading images

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo announced Wednesday that the social network was suspending all accounts that posted images from the appalling video allegedly showing the beheading of photojournalist James Foley.

"We have been and are actively suspending accounts as we discover them related to this graphic imagery. Thank you," Costolo tweeted.

Foley, 40, was kidnapped in Syria about two years ago while working as a freelance journalist, according to The New York Times. News of his whereabouts since then has been scant. On Tuesday, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria posted a gruesome video to YouTube that it said was the beheading of Foley. The authenticity of the video has not yet been verified and YouTube has since pulled it.

We have been and are actively suspending accounts as we discover them related to this graphic imagery. Thank you https://t.co/jaYQBKVbBF

-- dick costolo (

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Twitter says as many as 23 million accounts connect with automated services

James Martin/CNET

UPDATED 1:13pm PT Corrects misinterpretation of the quarterly filing and what the implications of it are. Twitter did not discuss "bots" in its filing. Some automated accounts post a Tweet when a door is opened, while others are used by news organizations to publish their latest headlines.

It turns out a chunk of active Twitter users aren't active participants.

In a new filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, the social networking service revealed that in the three months ended June 30, around 8.5 percent of its active accounts used third-party apps that automatically connect to Twitter for them, updating their streams without any effort. It's unclear whether these services are used to automatically post to Twitter, or merely to read information from the network. Either way, this means among the 271 million active Twitter accounts in total, around 23 million aren't putting much effort in.

So why is Twitter revealing this information? For the purpose of its SEC filing, the company is attempting to clarify how people use the service. This information can help investors better understand the growth rate of its active users, and how they use the service. Wall Street has closely watched user growth and activity among active users since the company went public last year.

In an attempt to express more precise measurements to the government and stockholders, Twitter's latest filing explained that around 11 percent of its accounts used third-party apps to tap into the service, meaning they didn't go directly through the website or one of the company's own products. But the 8.5 percent listed in the document do use third party technologies, such as HTC's Sense and Samsung's Touchwiz, giving them an ability to automatically pull information from Twitter with -- or without -- opening an app.

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"Historically we tracked and reported in this section all users who accessed Twitter through third-party applications," Twitter said in its SEC filing. "We have reviewed and refined our processes, however, to calculate a new metric that is comprised of only such active users who have used applications with the capability to automatically contact our servers for regular updates where there was no discernible user action involved."

(Via Quartz)

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