You know how on a Facebook News Feed, you'll occasionally see notifications about how one friend liked a random page or status and how another friend connected with someone you've never met? Over the past couple of weeks, Twitter has apparently been experimenting with doing similar things with your Twitter feed, as well.
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More and more Twitter users are reporting seeing notifications on their feed beyond the tweets of their friends. People are complaining that tweets that their friends have favorited are starting to show up on their feed alongside notifications of who the people they follow are following.
Twitter is known for tinkering around with their formula in the pursuit of a better product. Still, users have, unsurprisingly, been less than supportive of these recent experimental changes. The concept of sharing interesting content with followers that may not have otherwise seen it is already a core part of the Twitter experience via the retweet. Giving this functionality to follows and favorites not only has the potential to diminish the importance of the retweet, but it also could change the dynamic that follows and favorites have developed in Twitter interactions. Just because a user shows his appreciation of a tweet with a favorite, for example, doesn't necessarily mean he intends for his followers to see that as well.
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It still looks like this functionality is limited to a relatively small proportion of the Twitterverse, so there is still plenty of time for Twitter to take the hint and pull back on this experiment. Until then, though, you can check out some of the better frustrated responses from users over on The Next Web.
