Judging by the facebook algorithm, which is utterly terrible at showing important stuff, it seems unlikely. Just another step in the facebookification of twitter to appease short term oriented shareholders who rated the growth too highly.

It is already a mess, can't see how adding this will improve the situation. Opposite of the minimal, fast, realtime platform that so many flocked to in the first place. I'm close to deleting accounts for both.

No one has ever bought a company whose market cap is as big as FB's currently is -- let alone bought one for cash. But publicly-traded companies with caps in the billions have been bought in all-cash transactions, and the experience there is that the buyer usually ends up paying more than the market cap right before the investing public starts to become aware of the attempt to buy the company. But even if that were not true, what relevance would it have for whether or not it is a good idea to use market-cap data to compare publicly-traded companies and their products and strategies?

Does market cap not remain a good estimate of the future expected earnings of the company?

The parent did not make a claim that comparing the market cap of TWTR to that of FB is useful, nor am I attempting to make an "argument" in the opposite direction. The goal was to point out that measuring success by an extremely volatile marginal price which rates the stock at sixty-six times earnings is neither accurate nor useful. A little surprised that my attempt to provide useful information earned a handful of downvotes compared to the parents throwaway sentence.

If one honestly believes that market cap data is useful for comparing publicly traded companies in anything but the broadest sense, then one must believe that yesterday TWTR was "worth" 2.5% more of FB than today (judging by daily fluctuations in the TWTR:FB ratio). That is observably not the case, the only difference between that day and the previous is that the company made some information public, no facts at the coalface actually changed. Value of equity is decided over the very long term life of that equity.

As for your final question, one need only look back in history to see that the aggregate marginal daily price and hence market capitalisation is often (and especially in tech) not a good estimate of future expected earnings of a company. The market almost always overshoots, both to the upside and downside, largely depending on available liquidity.

For example, I really care about funny cats. My timeline is 85% cats, and I retweet funny cat pictures 65% of the time. However, the while you were away feature shows me things like opinions about voting, or holidays, or what co-workers are doing and saying, etc - Yah - it's in my feed, but I literally don't care. I spend 8 hours a day with my co-workers and hear all their tweets first hand. All I want are fun cat pictures from places that I haven't seen before to make the day easier to pass and to ward off depression... and it'd be great if twitter can make me a cat picture search engine. But for now they haven't done that for me yet.

Maybe they can allow a user to curate the "while you are away" algorithm so I can have a core set of twitter accounts that I really want to keep track of while I'm away ( https://twitter.com/cuteemergency and https://twitter.com/EmrgencyKittens ) and/or weigh explicitly which accounts I want to train my personal preference algorithms ... It would be pretty easy too since the lists feature already exists - just make it so the algorithm only pulls from an indicated list.

Until such a function exists I think i'll keep it off and just enjoy the cats.

Anecdotal, but I can see how this feature might or might not hit the target. All I can say is I hope they keep it an option that can be disabled or enabled and they don't take away the option box for this.

Mute them on Twitter if the unfollowing isn't socially acceptable?

I just don't need to be reminded about what they did "while I'm away" - by definition when I'm away from Twitter I'm most likely working and talking to them directly! And often I helped them write/make/instigate the tweet that is getting so much traffic that twitter emerges it as "something hot" from their account.

I get that I want to follow them and don't want to mute them - just that the feature is extraneous for some types of tweets (and some classes of twitter accounts) - for example, if I follow a stock tweet - one that tweets pricing alerts for example, I don't need to know 10+ hours later "what important things they are up to" because by definition, that stock tweet is no longer valid (trading day is only the length of the working day).

And even if I wanted historical updates, I can just go back to their timeline and/or do a search on the stock exchange symbol.

Like I said, if they allowed users to filter out or filter in - or use the List feature - which a large % of twitter users know about and use, it'd be more useful.

I just logged in to fb (Android app) for the first time today and was shown a post shared by a friend. I left a commmment and was shown a weird message "will be shown once online". Never seen it before, but no problem I just need to check my comment went through. Too bad! That shared post is no longer in my feed, even after dragging to refresh 3 or 4 times, each time showing completely different content, mostly stuff from previous days that I had already seen (but I still have to scroll for ages to check because what was on top might be down lower now). In the end I had to go to his fb page and check manually, because the algorithm that decided that post was important immediately changed its mind on my behalf.

PS: the comment now appears on some refreshes and not others.

I'm sure someone is going to tell me that I should unfollow more people, but that seems like a pretty crude and destructive method to try to increase the quality of my feed. I still want to see good quality tweets from the people who tweet a bit too much. I appreciate that use case (follow just a few accounts and read every tweet) though and definitely think they should cater to it.

It isn't crude or destructive at all because you will see those good quality tweets from people who are heavy users. You will see them when others who you still follow retweet the good ones. Your feed should be a solid mix of tweets you curated by following interesting people, and tweets those people curated for you by retweeting.

It can be a bit awkward to unfollow people you know because there is that social pressure to 'follow back' but this idea is worth it for the positive results.

To give a specific example, try unfollowing all local media outlets (newspaper, TV, radio) and instead follow one or two reporters whose feeds you find interesting. You will still see all the interesting local news and you avoid all the marketing and fluff that pollutes the media outlets' Twitter feeds.

I read every single Tweet in my feed every day and it only takes a few minutes. There is usually a ton of interesting and relevant stuff in there. I couldn't do this before, when I was following too many people.

I follow very few people I know in real life because they aren't interesting on Twitter. I don't feel bad about that — if you don't like what I tweet, you should unfollow me and we can still be real-life friends.

Mute them. It works well, and if they are engaged with others you follow it is all there, uncensored. So it isn't as harsh as a block, and they generally don't know about you putting it in place because you can still interact when your friends do, or when you choose.

I personally really hate this kind of thing as it clutters up my feed, and it never gives anything I care about. The value of Twitter for me come from the reverse-chronological feed, not this kind of thing.

Twitter would be really really cool if you could have your lists and then swipe through them like you do with the "Moments" feature (which is awful)

I actually use Facebook the same way too.

Yeah, I'd probably like this. I follow a LOT of people (right at the limit of how many you can follow) and I never expect to read every tweet. I just expect to check Twitter every now and then, and find a few useful / interesting nuggets of news. And occasionally I do a #hashtag search if I want to catch up on a specific topic.

So, for me, this kind of feature makes a lot of sense, as long as the algorithm does a good job of picking out the "good stuff".

It may not be for everybody, but I can see this being valuable for at least some percentage of Twitter users.

The "While You Were Away" view has been really frustrating to me, because I follow thousands of people and appreciate a summary, but if I accidentally click off it to Mentions I can't get it back. The Discover tab was great because I could click on it whenever I wanted.