Fast Company:
Twitter is rolling out a revised version of the timeline that indeed shuffles around some tweets into an order that isn’t purely reverse-chronological—but it doesn’t blow away the old format in the manner that had some users writing obituaries for the service.
I spoke with Michelle Haq, a Twitter product manager in charge of the timeline, about what’s new. Without further ado, some questions and answers.
Reading this, you can understand better how and why Twitter is making this relatively minor change. The good news is that is opt-in – if you’re like me and don’t want Twitter to “curate” your tweets, you won’t see any difference.
Its only opt-in at launch. Twitter’s blog post states they will be “turning on” the new format for all users in the weeks to come.
The even scarier decision is that they are creating a Committee for Public Safety or some such thing that will inevitably slide down the slippery slope to censoring unpopular opinion. They can do what they want with their platform, of course, but it is getting easier and easier to see them falling more into has-been MySpace territory than rival to Facebook.