Instagram announced it is changing its feed algorithm to display photos and videos that users are likely to expect the most. So far, the photos sharing app has been relying on a more simple approach that displayed its feed in reverse chronological sequence.
The personalized timeline will be in tune to what parent company Facebook uses to display its posts. What this means is that content from those that a user interacts with the most will be given precedence over others in populating his or her timeline. This, the makers of the app claim leads to users missing on an average 70 percent of feeds.
“What this is about is making sure that the 30 percent you see is the best 30 percent possible,” said Kevin Systrom while speaking to The New York Times.
The company stated they are relying on machine learning technology among others as means to sort the content. Apart from the timeliness of posts or relationship between users along with how often they get to interact with each other, the new feed algorithm is designed to also take into account time zone differences to prevent those living outside of the US from missing posts made overnight.
However, it is not known when the new timeline is going to be rolled out though developers stated they are testing it with a single digit percentage of users right now.
Meanwhile, another change that Instagram has adopted include in recent times include the Time stamps feature which now displays the actual dates instead of the number of weeks that has elapsed since a image was posted. Time stamps can be seen at the bottom of images.
The impending change is also a sign of growing popularity of Instagram which now boasts of more than 400 million active users worldwide, about a quarter of whom are from the US. However, many speculate if the change to a new timeline will still allow it to show real-time content, something that Instagram has been known for so far.
Meanwhile, Twitter too announced in February they have adopted feed customization techniques to display the most relevant tweets instead of displaying them from oldest to newest.
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