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TWITTER HAS GIVEN its strongest indication yet that it may introduce some kind of Facebook-style curated feed for users.
Speaking today, the company’s chief financial officer said that the traditional Twitter timeline which is organised in reverse chronological order is “not the most relevant experience for a user”.
Twitter has used the reverse chronological order for tweets ever since it began 8 years ago, but has recently been looking at ways to organise content and highlight the most interesting tweets. One such method has been its decision to show tweets from accounts you don’t follow in the main feed, something that has annoyed many users.
It is unlikely that such an option would replace the traditional feed but is likely instead to act as a complement to it.
Aside from a new-look timeline, a better search function and private chat functions may be some new features that Twitter is also working on.
Twitter’s CFO Anthony Noto has said that the company’s new head of Product, Daniel Graf, has made improving the service’s search capabilities one of his top priorities for next year, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Speaking at the Citi Global Technology Conference in New York, Noto hinted at the possibility of the site improving its search capabilities to help people find topic-specific content.
Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo offered a reason for the change to the timeline:
The possibility of group chats being introduced was also hinted at. Currently, users can only send a direct message to one account at a time and was a section Twitter had neglected for a while, but the popularity of instant messaging apps meant it now has a more prominent role.
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This feature drives me bats.
You can turn off autoplay in the iPhone settings – Facebook settings. Must be a similar feature on android. Not sure how to turn it off on desktop.
I did a piece on how to turn them off on both desktop and iOS/Android recently.
I included the link at the end of this piece, but in case you went straight down to the comments, here it is again (http://businessetc.thejournal.ie/facebook-auto-video-turn-off-1640664-Aug2014/).
Is there a way to turn them off on TheJournal app? They can be worse than the Facebook ones because they start playing when in the middle of reading an article..
Thank you @Petra
You’ve saved my sanity!
@Paperboy By right, they shouldn’t be playing automatically so I’m not sure what’s going on there (I was going through previous Vine articles on iOS/Android and none of them played automatically so I’m not sure how often that happens). Are there any articles in particular where this happened?
Thanks Quinton. Is there anyway to stop GIF’s? The flicker is quite sickening when you see them out of the corner of your eye while scrolling.
Quinton I have to agree with paperboy on this I have experienced it also but thought it was just my phone
I had an issue with vines playing automatically here. Think it was back around the time of the local election.
An app update fixed it though.
Quinton dude maybe it’s just me but I swear to God it just turns itself back on.
Sorry about this guys, it could possibly be a bug but it’s hard to tell what’s causing it without any real info (that’s why I was asking about articles earlier to try and pinpoint it).
The best I can do is highlight the issue with the tech team, but if you do come across it again, can you fire a mail with details to quinton[at]thejournal.ie?
Apologies for the vague response, but dealing with said issues is easier when we have as much info as possible and have a rough idea of what’s causing it.
The journal sometimes gestures autoplay vines in their articles which is equally intrusive and irritating.
*includes
Yeah and you can’t even see it because of all the text on the video.
Another reason to delete Facebook.. Never again will I bother with Facebook. Life is much better without it..
Digging their own grave.
And as for the new messenger app/function on facebook…… no no no
Delete delete delete
It’s actually easy to stop these videos. Here’s the link for the tutorial that I used, very handy, they were driving me mental before I found this:
Reading that back sounds like one of those “you won’t believe this simple trick to lose ten stone” ads but you’ll have to take my word for it I guess.
It you log into Facebook on your iPhone via Safari, you won’t have those annoying auto-playing videos. You’ll also seem to have fewer ads in your newsfeed, greater visibility of your Facebook own page, and you won’t have to switch to the annoying Messenger App to have a chat conversation. Here’s how:
Access Facebook.com through Safari and then save a bookmark to your home screen.
The only downside is that you’ll have to input your login details now and again. (which you could shortcut via Settings -> General -> Keyboard -> Add New Shortcut.
To me, the pros seem to outweighs any cons!
Also this will eat into your mobile data. You can turn it off in the settings menu on hour phone.
If there was another platform to move all my friends on to instead of Facebook I’d do it immediately. I don’t mean Twitter or pinterest either.
I want a network that isn’t selling me anything, second guessing what I like our selling my details to third parties
So it really is becoming FaceTube!
Its a pain in the swiss!
On Firefox at least there’s a little lego brick at the top left beside the address bar, you can just disable flash on Facebook, then switch it on for a video you do want to watch. Helps especially with older machines that get bogged down with all the rubbish.
have your say