Twitter Risks Backlash With New Order for Timeline

Twitter Inc. is changing its timeline to display popular tweets first, instead of the latest posts, a long-anticipated step that’s likely to anger its most passionate users.

While they might prefer the site to stay the way it is, Twitter has long known that the current format can be hard for new and infrequent users to digest. Because of the sheer volume of tweets passing by, people can miss the most important items, Twitter said in a blog post Wednesday. The new change comes after months of user testing, showing that people interact more if they are shown the best tweets, the San Francisco-based company said.