Early next week, there’ll be a new way for Twitter users to keep up with the subjects they’re interested in. It’s a new feature called ‘topics’ which launches on 13 July, and it involves following topics – more than 300 at launch covering entertainment, sports and gaming – rather than just following people/profiles.
Following a topic means that a user will see tweets about that subject from accounts that they don’t already follow, curated by a blend of machine-learning and human editors.
The Verge has a good rundown of how the new feature will work, including the music angle as explained by Rob Bishop. who’s leading the topics team at Twitter. “Bishop says the feature will shine for followers of big fandoms, such as major professional sports teams or the Korean boy band BTS,” it reports. “The group and its members represent one of the most discussed subjects on all of Twitter, he said, and yet, there are few official accounts on which to follow daily developments… That left fans searching for fan accounts, even though Twitter has a good idea of what the top accounts are. Now, fans can just follow the BTS topic, and Twitter will surface popular tweets about the band.”
We may have to wait until 13 November to see the full list of launch topics, to understand which other artists and musical topics are included.
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