@Jack Responds to #RIPTwitter: 'I *Love* Real Time' (And Yet ...)

In the new way that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey appears to have decided to respond to issues about the social communications company, we have ourselves a pre-Super Bowl tweetstorm about a brewing controversy called #RIPTwitter.

To explain briefly this tempest in a TweetPot, it stems from a story on BuzzFeed last night that the company was getting rid of reverse chronological tweets, the core of the feed, in favor of algorithmic ordering. In other words, Twitter would pick tweets for you to see, just like Facebook does, based on relevances.

Nay, says Jack, sort of: “Hello Twitter! Regarding #RIPTwitter: I want you all to know we’re always listening. We never planned to reorder timelines next week.”

But Dorsey did leave himself wiggle room with the “next week” and seemed to indicate that changes were indeed coming with a rejiggering of the feed to make it more palatable to average users and give them more choices of how to view it.

It’s easy to see why. Twitter is not easy for those normals to navigate — kind of like using a Klingon language only easy for its more rabid fanbase. But, in order to grow, a big issue with investors, it has to make some major tweaks to the product that change that.

Other efforts ongoing to do that include the ability to do longer tweets past the 140-character limit and also making terms used on the service less geeky. Some of these changes are not welcomed by those Klingon power users (#RIPTwitter designation is not user-friendly, for example), so Dorsey has to thread a very thin needle.

Dorsey said as much. “Twitter can help make connections in real-time based on dynamic interests and topics, rather than a static social/friend graph,” tweeted Dorsey. “We get it.”

Here are all the @jack tweets, if you care to follow this.

https://twitter.com/jack/status/696081566032723968

https://twitter.com/jack/status/696081671293001728

https://twitter.com/jack/status/696082907543154688

https://twitter.com/jack/status/696083407588106240

https://twitter.com/jack/status/696083745435099137

https://twitter.com/jack/status/696084334109859842

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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