Twitter might be unrecognizable soon.
The company is looking to change the microblogging platform's near-sacred timeline structure for an algorithmically directed feed similar to Facebook's, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.
"If you think about our search capabilities we have a great data set of topical information about topical tweets," said Twitter CFO Anthony Noto, as quoted by the Journal. Twitter needs "an algorithm that delivers the depth and breadth of the content we have on a specific topic and then eventually as it relates to people," he said.
The chronological timeline, which hasn't changed since the site was built eight years ago, "isn't the most relevant experience for a user" because timely tweets get buried at the bottom of the app, said Noto. "Putting that content in front of the person at that moment in time is a way to organize that content better."
Twitter officials appear to think that they know the site better than its own users do, a mindset that could be devastating.
"The idea of a curated newsfeed is angering many who believe that Twitter's non-interference in the content stream is a feature, not a bug," Brian Fung of the Washington Post's The Switch blog wrote on Thursday.
Users have already been angered by a recent Twitter experiment that published their favorited tweets in the timeline as if they had been retweeted.
In other bad news for the microblogging site, Twitpic founder Noah Everett has announced that the photo and video platform will be shutting down. Twitter apparently contacted Twitpic's legal department to demand that the site give up its trademark application.
"Unfortunately we do not have the resources to fend off a large company like Twitter to maintain our mark which we believe whole heartedly is rightfully ours," Everett wrote in the post. "Therefore, we have decided to shut down Twitpic."
The site will develop a platform to let users export all of their photos and videos that have been uploaded to Twitpic, Everett said.
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