Twitter tests non-chronological timeline & shows ads on the web

Twitter is testing new things to stop the stock from plummeting. They announced that they would now show ads on the web to non-logged in users, and in respons twitter share price rose 6%. Twitters new ad placements are between tweets on users timeline pages, and on pages that hightlight a specific tweet and its replies. To begin with this will only be seen when using the desktop/web service but as things usually go it'll probably extend to the mobile app soon enough. Twitter is trying the new ads with a small group of advertisers in the U.S., United Kingdom, Japan and Australia.

Another thing twitter is testing now is to do non-chronological order of tweets, instead showing tweets by relevance a small group of users are already seeing this - and reactions are not positive. In fact, the funniest response I saw was when @Angermonkey promised to mail their cats litter box to twitter HQ.

Twitter considers more FB-like moves. Users respond with litter box gifts. https://t.co/cTxKArkPcI

— Adland (@adland) December 8, 2015

"Yes, this is an experiment. We're continuing to explore ways to surface the best content for people using Twitter," spokeswoman Liina Potter said in an emailed statement.

We had a heads up in July when Jack Dorsey said during the company's second-quarter earnings conference: "You'll see us continue to question our reverse chronological timeline and all the work it takes to build one by finding and following accounts". The second half of that statement sounds like they'll make the "twitter-unfollow-&-follow-bug" a feature. The bug, which has existed since the beginning of twitter will randomly unfollow & follow people to your twitter account, without any alerts to you as a user. This does make it a lot of work to find and follow accounts if you have to keep doing it. It acts as random as the Twitter verify check is in who gets one.