Twitter’s Temporary Following Feature ⇥ buzzfeed.com

Alex Kantrowitz, Buzzfeed:

Twitter is built on a follow model, which is great for some use cases, but also means you’re going to miss a lot of great stuff from people you don’t follow. Unless you followed certain Democratic lawmakers, you likely missed lots of action from the House floor during the sit-in this week. But there’s a solution to that: A Twitter that temporarily inserts relevant tweets from the right people at the right moment into your timeline would be a much more useful Twitter. Amazingly, this Twitter already exists but is buried puzzlingly deep within the platform’s user interface.

Instead of following users, this feature enables the temporary following of events. Tweets from so-called “influential” or “relevant” users will be inserted until the event ends. Of course, this is only available in Twitter’s official apps.

Bafflingly, instead of emphasizing features like this that are core to the entire experience of Twitter, the company has instead introduced stickers.