Weekend Wrap-Up: Twitter Messes with the Timeline; Snapchat Explores Advertising

Happy Sunday afternoon! It’s Weekend Wrap-Up time, which means we’re going to recap some of the top stories in tech from the past week.

The past seven days were pretty quiet as far as tech news goes, but there were some interesting developments. Let’s get to them.

Twitter Messes with the Timeline, Inserts Tweets from Users You Don’t Follow

My favorite thing about Twitter, to this point, has been that the company doesn’t mess with the stream. On Facebook, algorithms are hard at work trying to show you what the site thinks you want to see. On Twitter, you see what you want to see. When you follow someone, you know you’re going to see their updates. And you can rest assured that, aside from retweets or ads, you won’t see content from people you don’t follow. This past week, Twitter stated that will no longer be the case, and that users should prepare to see content from some users regardless of whether they’re followed or not. Will there be a user backlash? I’m sure we’ll find out soon enough.

Snapchat Looks to Ads to Create Revenue

If you found a penny on the ground today, you’ve actually made more money than Snapchat since it launched. The company has no revenue to speak of, but that might change according to reports from earlier this week. Snapchat may be looking to advertising to generate some income, using a service tentatively named Snapchat Discovery to show users ads in the form of video clips or news bits. We don’t have a timetable on when the ads would launch, but we’ll update when we do. Stay tuned.

New California Law Will Force Google Cars to Have Steering Wheels

Google’s self-driving automobiles are pretty darn futuristic, but there’s one bit of ancient car technology that’ll be stuck with the vehicles thanks to a new California law. The steering wheel, even though it’ll be rarely used (if at all), will have to stay in the car. Why? New rules from the California DMV state that anyone operating an autonomous car on a public road must be “capable of taking over immediate physical control” of the car in an emergency. Google plans to comply with the rule by adding a small steering wheel and pedals.

Amazon Forges Ahead with Prime Air, Hires New Employees

The FAA may have banned non-recreational drone use, but that doesn’t seem to be stopping Amazon and its Prime Air initiative. The company appealed the FAA’s decision and has gone ahead and hired new staff to help build the program out. Amazon believes that Prime Air will help create jobs, and used that as the basis of its argument for the appeal. The company’s list of hires for Prime Air are pretty impressive; for instance, Amazon nabbed Avi Bar-Zeev, whose company originally created the product that became Google Earth. There’s also astronaut Neil Woodward, who will serve as Technical Program Manager, and former Bing team member Paul Viola, who will be the division’s Vice President of Science.