Twitter’s new feature shows you the top tweets since you last logged in

We can’t always be sitting at our phones/computers constantly refreshing Twitter, but every time you leave you might miss something good. To make sure you don’t, Twitter has started rolling out a new recap feature to its mobile app called ‘While You Were Away’.

First spotted by TechCrunch, While You Were Away collects the top tweets since you last logged in and places them at the top of your mobile timeline. How it decides the top tweets is unclear, but it’ll likely be an algorithm based on how many people engaged with it.

While it might be useful to some, it does sound awfully similar to Facebook’s non-chronological News Feed. Some occasional Twitter users may find it useful, but since the Twitter mobile app saves your last known feed position this will be a bit pointless for very active mobile users.

Since the feature hasn’t rolled out to everyone yet it makes it difficult to see what kind of tweets are included. Techcrunch claims that Twitter declined to comment about the new feature, so we can’t exactly ask it for info either.

Hopefully it’ll be a bit more in depth than simply pulling out the most popular posts, otherwise you could just end up seeing nothing but tweets from celebrities that got lots of Retweets — rather than stuff you care about.

Expect to start seeing ‘While You Were Away’ popping up in your timeline fairly soon.