The microblog service has started to roll out a new “while you were away” feature. The latter presents a recap of important tweets you may have missed since your last visit and in fact pins the “best” tweets to the top of your timeline the next time you launch the app or open Twitter page in the browser.

The “while you were away” feature is similar to Facebook’s news feed that annoyingly tends to present status updates and posts in a ranked manner, rather than in chronological order. It is also recognized as the first major Twitter feature beyond promoted tweets and ads to sort tweets in a non-chronological manner.

When the company announced the new feature as part of its “Timeline Highlights” improvements, it said that every time you visit Twitter, you’ll see something great now. The new feature is designed to preserve important tweets for you, which could get drowned out by the rapid flow of tweets on a daily basis. It is known that over 500 million tweets are sent every day, and many users follow too many accounts, which makes Twitter timelines a torrent of rolling thoughts.

The response of Twitter users to a new feature is controversial. Their reactions range from delight to confusion and frustration. Twitter explained that a gradual rollout to more users is expected soon. The “while you were away” feature is part of the company’s plan to rein in Facebook’s lead. So far, Facebook accounts for 1.3 billion users, while Twitter can only boast less than 300 million. However, the company’s executives believe that the number of Twitter users could be almost doubled to more than 550 million in the nearest future, and a longer-term goal is at least 1 billion.