Twitter mulls significant change to service in wake of stock price decline

Social media platform Twitter will introduce a dramatic change to its service, reorganising the order of messages from a chronological stream to a powered algorithm ordering tweets that are judged to be the most relevant to the reader or timely as early as next week. The reported move is the latest under chief executive and founder Jack Dorsey as the darling of the digital domain looks to reverse a series of dramatic falls in its share price.

The company tested a non-chronological stream late last year, but came up against criticism from users, and in 2014 the platform's chief financial officer even admitted that the system was not the most "relevant" to the user experience. The new initiative will bring the social media giant more into line with key rival Facebook where members are used to seeing posts out of chronological order. The change in the system is likely to be opt-in in its primary

The change in the system is likely to be opt-in to begin with, but has already led to tweets from upset users and the creation of a hashtag on Twitter itself proclaiming its demise at #RIPTwitter.

Twitter user Stuart McAllister took to the social media site and said: "We left Facebook for a reason, don't make Twitter the same. New logo should be Facebook upside down."

Dr Paul Coxon, a physicist in material sciences at Cambridge University added: "I have my own timeline algorithm, it's called 'following people'."

Since his appointment at the helm of Twitter in October 2015 Dorsey has introduced other changes to the service introducing Twitter Moments, which allows direct messages larger than Twitter's infamous 140-character limit. Twitter has recently been linked to speculation surrounding a takeover of the company. It has been linked to approaches from both News Corporation and the private equity group Silver Lake.

Last month a spokesman for News Corporation said that there was no truth to the takeover rumours. Twitter has remained below its original stock price of $26 (£17.91) since November last year. On 5 February, the micro-blogging site said that since mid-2015 its had suspended more than 125,000 accounts for "threatening or promoting terrorist acts", related to Islamic State (Isis).