Twitter Testing Non-Chronological Timelines (vice.com)

sarahnaomi writes with this excerpt from Motherboard: Brace yourself, because your favorite social media platform might get turned on its head: Twitter is experimenting with a new way of sorting your timeline that breaks with the reverse-chronological format it has used since its inception. Certain users have already been selected for testing, and a Twitter search for "timeline out of order" revealed a lot of confused Tweeters. A Twitter spokesperson confirmed via email that this is "an experiment. We're continuing to explore ways to surface the best content for people using Twitter." Presumably, Twitter is working with algorithms similar to the ones Facebook uses to order items on your News Feed. I curse the name of Zuckerberg each time I realize that my view of Facebook has been switched from "Most Recent" to "Top Stories" -- Top Stories according to whom?

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[darkain]

For that last note: on Facebook, "Most Recent" isn't actually the most recent posts at all. A couple things are happening. Firstly, it is the "Most recently interacted with", meaning if something is commented on, it jumps to the front of the line. Next, Facebook selects aprox 320 posts to show each user, with new content appearing every now and then, and content being removed after about 24-72 hours. Even if you follow 1000 pages posting once a day, Facebook will only select the aprox 320 that it thinks you want. From here, "Most Recent" then only becomes the most recent of this smaller selection, not all posts from your potential feed. So when Facebook switches between "Top Stories" and "Most Recent", you're honestly not getting anything new/different between the two, just sorting smaller segment of your feed that it deems you should be able to view.