Twitter announces a new feature “While you were away” on their iOS App. This feature adds a functionality to access miss tweets when you are not logging in to your Twitter account for sometime. Recap feature will be a look back kind of feature wherein if you have not logged in your account for few days, twitter will give you top tweets from your timeline as a snapshot. This feature though goes directly in contrast with the Twitter philosophy of real time, unorganized and unfiltered timeline for its users.
The company official blog post reads:
“A lot can happen while you’re on the go. To fill in some of those gaps, we will surface a few of the best Tweets you probably wouldn’t have seen otherwise, determined by engagement and other factors. If you check in on Twitter now and then for a quick snapshot of what’s happening, you’ll see this recap more often; if you spend a lot of time on Twitter already, you’ll see it less.”
A lot of time if you do not log in to your twitter account for long, some good tweets may get buried under 
this feature aims to put those tweets in the front. For users who are hooked to twitter and have fear of missing some good tweet at middle of night may find this feature more useful. As of now Twitter has released this feature on their iOS App. They are soon going to release the same for Android users and on Web.
Our take on how Twitter can enhance the usability of Recap to make is more relevant for the users !!
- Twitter should give users option to select the past time from which they want the tweets to view for Recap
- An option to add favorite followers whose tweet should be given priority on the Recap
- An option to select topics for the best tweets, if you prefer technology over sports, the tweets pertaining to technology would be more missed by you
- Twitter should make this feature more personal, maybe adding a few of your own past or top tweets to give you a flashback of your timeline
- Also please do put an off switch also, for some this might be a good feature for others it would be just an annoying ticker on the timeline.
Twitter has come under lot flack recently for its falling revenue and falling number of users. Arrival Facebook is grabbing more and more active users on their Facebook as well as Instagram platform. Twitter is playing hard by releasing a lot of new features to keep users hooked to its platform. Twitter VP for Product Kevin Weil, promised to add new features to twitter to make is easier to create, share, consume and connect through his blog post in November 2014. Though Recap was not mentioned in the blog post we can expect a slew of functionality from twitter in the coming year.
