Twitter Highlights Lures Lazy Users With Friends' Activity

Twitter has rolled out Highlights, a new feature aiming at summarizing some of the peaks from your timeline that you might have otherwise missed. The new tool automatically cooks up a summary of the most interesting things the people you're following are tweeting, along with local trending topics, twice a day. For Twitter, meanwhile, it's another way to try to maintain active users.

Twitter has historically been fighting a battle with users who sign up for the service, perhaps tweet a few times and follow a couple of others, but then abandon their profile unloved.

Highlights could well change that, by forcing such users to see exactly what they're missing. The "instant summary" will be fired out via push notifications twice a day, in the hope that it will prove a suitable a lure to re-engage.

Among the curated chatter will popular conversations, interesting tweets from specific people, and individuals, topics, and events that are trending. Twitter is promising that it should at least be relevant, since the tweets you see will only be from those people you already follow.

Highlights will initially only be available to users of the Twitter app for Android, not to mention be turned off by default. You'll need to be using the app in English, too, though Twitter says more platforms and languages are in the pipeline.

To enable Highlights, head to the Twitter app settings page and tap "Mobile Notifications"; from there, check the box for "Highlights".

If you'd rather not wait for the push notification, meanwhile, the same curated content can be accessed by hitting the new Highlights button, found in the top navigation bar.

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