Twitter News Comes Full Circle with Topics
In 2016, Twitter made a move. It recategorized itself in the App Store by moving from being categorized with the likes of Facebook and Instagram in “Social networking” to “News.” The switch was a signal of where Twitter saw its potential growth coming from. Twitter wanted to be the place where users consume news. Here we are three years later, and news is shared on Twitter as much as ever. Beyond that the company has had recent financial success in the last few quarters, but new issues have popped up. New user on-boarding has been a challenge, and the echo chamber on Twitter has not only been recognized as a problem, it’s been identified as detrimental to democracies and free society.
That brings us to today. Twitter just launched the ability for users to follow not just people on the platform but specific topics, like sports, entertainment, gaming, specific teams and so on. There are around 300 topics to choose from, and when users follow a topic, they’ll start to see tweets, curated by the platform from others who may not be followed by users but are authorities on a given subject, in their timelines.
Topics represents a shift by Twitter from emphasizing the following people to following interests. That means users signing up for the platform will have a much easier time getting content brought into their feeds that interests them immediately. Instead of considering the right people to follow, they simply need to follow their personal interests. Twitter becomes a feed of interesting content right away, instead of over time as users follow various accounts.
Topic follows also allow users who have chosen specific people to follow to be served perspectives from other authorities on a given topic. While politics are not immediately available as a topic to follow from Twitter, the potential to expose users to perspectives they would have otherwise not seen is there.
Topics are a feature that could and maybe even should have been available on the platform all along, but it’s better late than never. Topics could be huge for the platform, both from the perspective of breaking down filter bubbles and getting new users on-boarded. Topics represent Twitter coming full circle on being a a news app, not just a social networking one. Topics could be Twitter’s killer feature.