San Francisco – Twitter [NASDAQ:TWTR] has unveiled a new feature ‘Highlight’ on its Twitter for Android app. Highlight enables a rich push notification system to provide a summary of top tweets from the user’s network.
Highlight is an opt-in feature as of now. When a user enable the highlight feature Twitter will send the user report of the top Highlights twice daily. The top tweets are decided on the basis of the people a user is following, current trending topics in the geography and popular people in your network. The top tweets are displayed in a new digest form in the Twitter app itself.
The tweets in the highlight section are not sorted on the basis of time stamp they are rather arranged on the basis of their importance as per Twitter Algorithm.
The basis of deciding the topics for the Highlights are:
- Popular Conversations among your followers
- Popular tweets in your network
- Trending topics or events in your area
- Popular people in your network
Android users can enable the Highlight features by selecting the Highlights checkbox from the Settings option. Twitter has released Highlights only for English to all Android users. A blog post announcing the highlight feature states that Twitter may soon unveil this feature on their Web and iOS platform soon. They are testing this feature in public for the Android platform as of now.
Twitter announced the new feature by twitting though their official twitter handle:
Introducing Highlights. Get the best of Twitter every day, sent to your Android device: https://t.co/9ZUWgX9lcC pic.twitter.com/sYuu7YUO4D
— Twitter (@Twitter) April 23, 2015
Twitter has been under lot of pressure to make a strong hold in the competitive social media space. Facebook and its subsidiaries Instagram and WhatsApp are diverting people attention from Titter. Twitter has released a number of features related to Direct messages, Retweet with comments, new abuse policy, while you were away and other features.
Twitter’s Highlight feature could be compared to Facebook News Feed which brings the best posts from their network to you at the top. Facebook also released a similar app Facebook Home in 2013, which replace the Home Screen of Android Phone with a Facebook feed of top postings. Facebook Home failed miserably to pick up. Only time will tell if Twitter has hit the right mark with this new feature.
