Twitter Magic Recs: Site quietly kills off one of its most useful accounts

The tool will live on, but in the form of push notifications, as Twitter looks to become more of a news service

The functions will live on in push notifications (Getty Images)

Perhaps the most useful of all Twitter accounts has been killed.

The site has announced that it is shutting down its Magic Recs account, which had previously notified people when an account was getting a lot of attention, in case users wanted to follow them.

It’s not clear why Twitter moved to shut down the account. It said that many of its features had now been integrated into push notifications, and so the account was no longer necessary.

Those push notifications only work on mobile. They’re turned on by heading to the settings and clicking through to notifications, where there is a “Recommendations” tab that can be switched on, though it appears to be activated by default.

“@MagicRecs is no longer regularly sending recommendations through Direct Message,” a spokesperson said. “Recommendations that were previously shared via Direct Message are now delivered via push notification.”

But it might also work as a way of encouraging users to turn on those same notifications. Doing so might help Twitter in its apparent aim to become more well used, and potentially to become a news app.

Magic Recs first appeared as an account in 2013. It started sending out its messages through push notifications to phones later the same year, and so for a long time it hasn’t been necessary to follow the account to receive the information that it sends out.

Another account called Event Parrot worked much the same, looking out for news events that it thought would be interesting to users. That has also been shut down.