whileyouwereaway
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Twitter's 'while you were away' recaps are here
Concerned you're missing out a tweetstorm or two while doing annoying things like flying, sleeping, or having face to face conversations? Twitter is ready to fix that problem with its "while you were away" feature. Spotted a few weeks ago in a soft launch, the blog post announcing its official rollout suggests the screen will pop up more frequently if you usually take breaks between Twitter sessions -- it's possibly power users won't be seeing it much at all. The service believes it can strike a balance between "improving" the timeline without destroying the real-time response many users love -- we'll see if that's true. "While you were away" is rolling out for all Twitter users on iOS starting today, while Twitter.com and the Android app should see it soon. Update (2/23): And now it's on Android too.
Twitter has a new way to keep you up to date while you're AFK
It isn't quite a "filtered feed" (yet), but it's looking like Twitter's rolling out a new feature to keep you up to speed when you aren't constantly refreshing your timeline. It's dubbed "while you were away," and, as TechCrunch points out, it appears to be rolling out to a large chunk of the microblogging service's users. What it does is compiles top tweets since you last logged in (likely based on amount of favorites and retweets, although the methodology isn't quite clear), and places them at the top of your timeline on mobile. Along with those daily email summaries, it seems like another way to keep people in the loop if they aren't the most hardcore users. And possibly to the dismay of them, it makes the service a bit more like Facebook's non-chronological news feed. We'd love to hope this recap function won't pull in sponsored tweets from a certain bikini model shilling a mobile game, but that likely won't be the case.
