Twitter is exploring ways for its users to follow interests on its platform, executives announced Tuesday. To achieve this, the company will curate tweets around a number of popular topics that users can then follow. The goal of the new feature was to make it as easy to follow an interest as it is to follow a person on Twitter, said Sriram Krishnan from the Twitter product group.
Once a user follows a curated topic, they will get to see relevant tweets and live events right in their timeline. Users will also be able to hide events and mute topics to avoid spoilers around TV shows or sports events. The topics a user follows will be public, and it will be easy to subscribe or unsubscribe to a topic.
Topics are being curated with the help of machine learning. “Twitter is about what is happening right now,” said Rob Bishop from the company’s product group. Human curation would be too slow to curate such topics, he argued.
Twitter will be kicking off the new feature with curated sports topics like Formula 1 and the MMA. The company is first testing topics on Android, Bishop said.
The company showed off the test at a press event at its office in San Francisco Tuesday, where executives outlined key areas of work for the coming months. In addition to interests and topics, Twitter also wants to work on improving its product for international markets, as well as issues around abuse.
“It is imperative that we increase the health of the public conversation,” said Twitter product lead Kayvon Beykpour.