Twitter cofounder admits it has 'too much data and too much information'
Apr 29, 2015, 04:42 IST
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Although he's now CEO of Medium, Evan Williams said he's been arguing for moving away from the chronological waterfall, or really avalanche, of tweets that sometimes overwhelm its users.
"If you think of Twitter today versus when we started, it's clear that there is too much data and too much information, and we should help people," Williams said at the Bloomberg Businessweek Design conference. "The goal has never been to show people in reverse chronological order, it's been to tell people what's happening."That's a bit easier said than done, and Williams acknowledged that it is hard for a company of its size. "I'm a huge proponent of the idea of playing with the pure reverse-chron list," Williams said. "I'm glad we're making progress on that." Twitter CEO Dick Costolo highlighted two of the efforts Twitter has been making to curate some its content on its earning call today. Costolo praised its "While You Were Away" feature, nicknamed Recap internally, which selects tweets that you missed between logins to highlight at the top of your page. He also mentioned Twitter's revamped, "logged-out" homepage that allows non-Twitter users to click on categories like Tech News and see tweets from a curated list. "As we iterate on the logged out experience and curate topics, events and moments that unfold on the platform, you should absolutely expect us to deliver those experiences across the total audience, and that includes logged in users and users in syndication," Costolo said on the call.