Twitter starts rolling out 'While You Were Away' feature

Microblogging website Twitter has started the gradual rollout of its 'While You Were Away' feature, which it had announced in early November. With this feature, Twitter takes the "best tweets" from users' network and puts them on top of their feed when they open the app; the company has not disclosed how it determines the "best tweets."

With 'While You Were Away', Twitter users will be able to keep track of important news and topics on their feed when they log into the app again. Not all users have access to this feature, but based on a Twitter search, it seems that the number of people talking about it has increased over the past month, suggesting a wider rollout.

'While You Were Away' is the first feature by Twitter to not follow the chronological format for displaying content. It is, in fact, similar to Facebook's Top Stories feature, which also displays the most important of posts in the news feed.

Twitter recently fell behind Instagram in the social networking race when the photo-sharing app beat the microblogging website in terms of user base. While Twitter has 284 million users, it aims to have a user base of over a billion. At present, Facebook is the only social networking website with over a billion users.