Twitter is testing a new feature that will show users custom timelines built by developers that will combine tweets based on content pulled from accounts, hashtags, etc. around a specific topic or interest and other media.
Amir Shewart, the company’s director of product for developer platforms, announced the experiment on Twitter, where he posted a photo of a custom timeline made by the creators of The Singles.
The “Bachelor” timeline will be available to a small group of users in the U.S. and Canada for 10 weeks, Twitter said. Users who are included in the custom timeline test will be prompted on the web to pin the timeline next to their main timeline.
Over the years, Twitter has been known for its wobbly mood when it comes to developers, initially being very open to third parties building custom interfaces to use Twitter, then moving away and focusing on those built in specific use cases.
If this goes beyond the experimental stage, the customized timeline illustrates Twitter’s continued search for more ways to reach mass-market users who may not want to curate their own content feeds around a particular interest.
It also opens the door for people to have different streams of information on Twitter for different purposes at the same time for a long time, say, if you’re an NFL fan, but also use Twitter to keep track of news at work, while you’re focusing on another, you don’t want to be distracted by one of them. More than a decade later, this November, Twitter will be hosting its developer conference, so we’ll probably hear more about decentralization and custom timelines by then.
The company notes that content on this timeline will be selected and ranked based on relevance to timeline topics, using information such as search terms, topics and human curation. So you can’t switch to the latest tweets view.
Users can already create custom timelines with lists, which allow you to select accounts that can be pinned to the mobile app and viewed by swiping through them on the home screen. However, since this is based on the stream of tweets from your listed accounts, you can’t do any more curation or filtering.
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