Is the New Twitter Activity Feature Insane?

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Change is the law that rules the social media and the addition of the new twitter activity feature is just an analogue to the same.

Though the announcement for the brand new twitter activity tab was made as early as on August, 2011 on this blog post by twitter, yet it functionally came into being only on last Thursday 10th Nov, 2011.

What does that activity tab do?

The activity tab is designed to present all the activities of your followers and the people you follow at a miniature level under one roof. In twitter’s own words – “It provides a rich new source of discovery by highlighting the latest Favorites, Retweets, and Follows from the people you follow on Twitter – all in one place. It’s easier than ever to explore Twitter, connect with people, and discover what’s happening around the world.”

So, in a simple term, this new twitter activity feature tries to lessen the labor required in searching & finding the best and vest interested contents as well as people on twitter. If you get a hint to compare twitter vs. Facebook, you would notice that with this activity tab twitter is trying to erect something more or less of Facebook news feed feature.

Pros: 

Twitter is right as it depicts the ease of access with this latest addition. It will present the “what is happening” within twitter more accurately and timely than earlier and ever.

Probably, your favoring power on twitter won’t go in vein, as you would be able to get a far clearer picture to mark a real trending tweet as your favorite one.

Image Credit: Twitter Blog

Cons: 

As I said above, with this new feature, Twitter is trying behemoth to present something that the social networking giant Facebook possesses. As a matter of consequence, twitter itself has neglected the very fact that it is a micro blogging platform with a character limitation of 140 words and not something where you could broadcast a full story.

In comparison to Facebook character limit, the 140 words/characters in twitter are not that good to possess a tab showing all of your followers’ activities. Twitter is twitter, not a place where we are supposed to expect a collage of varied interests in one place.

Again if we look at the angle twitter vs. Facebook from the ‘activity’ point of view, it pokes in the eyes to know that twitter doesn’t have any option to list-out/manage people whom you want to monitor under this activity tab, whereas in Facebook you can always select to unsubscribe from anyone’s updates/activities at any point of time.

And finally, there is no way that you could turn that Activity tab off. All you can do is just pray and tweet to @feedback with a hashtag #Activity

So, I feel this new twitter activity feature is just an insane option, as it doesn’t consider the greater part of user interests. What do you say?