Mike Jahr:

You follow hundreds of people on Twitter — maybe thousands — and when you open Twitter, it can feel like you’ve missed some of their most important Tweets. Today, we’re excited to share a new timeline feature that helps you catch up on the best Tweets from people you follow.

Here’s how it works. You flip on the feature in your settings; then when you open Twitter after being away for a while, the Tweets you’re most likely to care about will appear at the top of your timeline – still recent and in reverse chronological order. The rest of the Tweets will be displayed right underneath, also in reverse chronological order, as always. At any point, just pull-to-refresh to see all new Tweets at the top in the live, up-to-the-second experience you already know and love.

Seems very reasonable and if I understand it correctly, this will be opt-in, which is rare these days. I wish Twitter kept all their new email mailing lists opt-in too.

P.S. This feature is not available nor will it affect the users of third party apps such as Twitterrific and Tweetbot.