Twitter’s signup process it pretty easy but once you get past that you have to work a bit to get some value out of the service. A user can decide who to follow and once they hit that little blue button they have to wait and see if the stuff that account posts really does interest them. During the signup process new users are given recommendations on who to follow. Their timelines are not automatically populated and users have to follow people first just to get things started. Looks like Twitter is going to change this soon.
The New York Times reports that Twitter has started testing “instant timeline.” We first heard about this feature from Twitter back in November when it told investors that instant timeline will immediately surface content from the social network for new users who wouldn’t have to go through the traditional setup process to get some value out of the service.
According to the scribe this feature went into testing last week. Signup process is pretty much the same. Choose a username, enter a password and if you want, give the app access to the contacts on your device, so that it can scan them and see which of your contacts are already on Twitter.
Previously users had to follow people from this list and from Twitter’s recommended accounts to get some content in their timelines. With instant timelines there is no need of doing that.
Without having to follow anyone new users will see their timelines being populated automatically with content pulled from across Twitter.
Instant timeline will have frequent reminders for users telling them to follow people. Once they do and their timeline starts to fill up the automatically pulled in content will start to disappear on its own.
Twitter plans to roll out instant timelines for all new users within a few months provided that the initial testing goes well.
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