Why You Should Be Excited About Twitter Putting Random Favorites Into Your Feed

Your feed doesn’t have to be sacred.

This weekend, in keeping with its rich tradition of constantly testing new features inside select groups, Twitter rolled out an experimental feature that inserts tweets into your stream that have been favorited by people you follow. As is the case whenever a social network makes a broad change, users are none too pleased.

And there's definitely reason to be frustrated. Twitter devotees are wildly protective of their feeds, which are often carefully manicured. For those who use Twitter obsessively in their lines of work, or already suffer from cluttered feeds, the introduction of tweets they didn't ask for feels more like a bug than a feature.

But there's a good case to be made that adding the favs of those you follow into your timeline is a refreshing and exciting prospect that, if executed properly, could change the way you use the social network. Here's why I think you should be excited:

1. It's a new perspective.

In practice, this experiment is a lot like adding a very lightweight version of the site's Activity Feed (which allows you to view your network exclusively through the interactions of the accounts you follow) into your timeline.

As I've written about previously, the Activity Feed offers a new angle from which to view Twitter, giving you the chance to step outside of your feed and perhaps surface users and links you would have otherwise never seen. This is a good thing! Even if you obsessively curate and manicure your follows list, it's easy to get stuck in ruts on Twitter following and interacting with the same people. As a journalist, it's an opportunity to maybe catch an obscure link or find a user you thought you followed but don't (I find this happens all the time). As a casual user, it's maybe the best way to find real-live humans and official accounts that are contributing (sometimes valuably!) to Twitter, instead of the dud celebrity accounts that Twitter often foists onto new users. The Activity Feed is secretly one of the best recommendation engines on the internet, and the idea of Twitter featuring it prominently in some form is good news.

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