Twitter is reportedly working on a News Feed style algorithm that would curate content.

Curation or chaos?

According to a report in The New York Times, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo is experimenting with a Facebook-style News Feed that would display the most relevant, as opposed to the most recent, content.

But is this a potential step backward for Twitter?

Raw, rough and real-time

Yes, Twitter’s News Feed can be a very noisy place, but one of the advantages Twitter enjoys over virtually every other network is its unfiltered feed, making it the premium place for breaking news and live events.

If Twitter moves to a Facebook model of curated, less current content it’s potentially taking away a large part of what many users enjoy about the platform.

And while Twitter already has some curation tool (it currently hides @replies and has begun prioritising some tweets) how the News Feed appears is largely decided by who a user follows.

Brave new(s) world

However, Twitter might be betting that upsetting established users might be worth the benefit of attracting new users, which it has struggled to do so far this year.

Stay tuned.

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