Aiming to improve the user experience of the Twitter timeline, the micro-blogging site has begun limited testing of a ‘new tweets’ notification feature.
When users log on to Twitter.com, they will receive a notice alerting them to how many new tweets their followers have made since they last visited the site.
“So if one of the folks you follow has tweeted since you loaded your homepage, you’ll get a little notice saying ‘1 new tweet’ that, when clicked, will display the new content,” said the Twitter status blog.
“We think it improves the tweet consumption experience and hope to roll it out to everyone as soon as we can.”
Right now, when you log onto the main Twitter site, there is no way of telling what has happened since you checked in last so the user usually ends up trawling back through hundreds of tweets to make sure they didn’t miss anything.
This new feature, although small, should improve the overall Twitter experience, especially for those following a lot of people.
The Twitter notification addition follows on from the recent introduction of Lists, whereby users can mass follow lists of people. This has the advantage of following, say, a recommended list of Irish politicians or if you create a list of your favourite Twitterers you can skip straight to this to tune out all other noise.
By Marie Boran
Photo: Twitter users, when they log into the site, may soon find an alert to the number of new tweets their followers have made since the user was last on the site.
