I have been on the fence about the algorithim issue with Twitter, because I wanted to see it in action first before judging the service. After reading this, I’m leaning more towards not wanting to see the feature at all for the simple reason that one tweet is not more valuable than another. What is valuable is the common thread linking 100–200 tweets in a row that gives me a strong indication of not only what is happening in the world, but also what is important to people.

This is the key difference between Facebook and Twitter for me. Facebook rarely surfaces anything news worthy to me (unless it’s sponsored content, of course.) If I want to see a reaction or details to an event that is important to me, I have to generally scan one of the news stories that pops up and hope it gives me what I want. With Twitter, I don’t have to do that digging into an individual tweet to see what’s going on. It’s all right there in my stream, uncensored.

If Twitter changes so it’s smarter about putting the common threads at the top, then it should work. If it decides to surface the tweets of the people who follow you back, then it will be a failure.

That seems to be what “While you were away” is. My current selection has no analysis of Super Bowl 50, nothing about the New Hampshire primary, nothing about Beyoncé, and so on. I get tweets about borscht (with 4 likes), new luggage (2 likes), and a post about TBT.

Those tweets are all fine, because they’re from people I enjoy, but are they an indication of the tweets I really want to see first before all others? Unlikely.