Twitter exec promises social network is about to ‘change forever’

This is big. The way you search for and discover things on Twitter is about to “change forever”.

That’s according to a tweet sent out by Pankaj Gupta, an engineering manager at the social network, who indicated that there would be an announcement about the changes later today:

Search & discovery in @twitter set to change forever after tmrw. Team – congrats and enjoy the enormity of ur impact few understand today!

— Pankaj Gupta (@pankaj) July 6, 2012

At this stage it’s unclear exactly what those changes will entail, although we can get a few clues from the direction Twitter’s been taking in the past few months. The launch of the “Discover” tab late last year, along with increased support for multi-media and improved integration on Facebook, could suggest that the social network could be moving toward social curation.

As Business Insider recently pointed out, that would put it in direct competition with the likes of Flipboard.

That could be why Flipboard CEO Mike McCue stepped down from Twitter’s board of directors.

Gupta would be a natural candidate to lead Twitter’s bid to improve its search and discovery features. He’s the man who helped build Twitter’s equivalent of Google’s PageRank algorithm.

According to Gupta, the algorithm is “used throughout various Twitter features”.