Twitter has announced it is testing new ways for users to start customising their tweet experience. By applying different algorithms to highlight content more suited to users’ interests, the Social giant wants your main feed (on the web version for now) to display topic-focused timelines which you can swipe or click on from.
“Custom Timelines,” as Twitter explained via its support page, “are curated feeds”. These feeds may be created by third-parties who select and provide content around interests and events, or by Twitter based on general insights.
What do Custom Timelines mean?
The above image describes what a customised timeline looks like. As noted in its report, a spokesperson to the Verge said Twitter has chosen @BacheloretteABC to first take part in the experiment.
The Bachelorette custom Timeline will be available for 10 weeks as a “limited test” on the web for a “small group” of people in the US and Canada. The Beta Testers will be prompted in-app. After you see a prompt about a custom Timeline on the Home screen, you can easily add it by following the steps outlined here.
Content in the custom timelines will be algorithmically served, but there’s no option right now to switch to a reverse chronological feed.
Twitter also noted, “Content that appears in a custom Timeline is selected and ordered based on relevance to the Timeline’s theme using information like search terms, Topics, handles, and manual curation.”
Twitter already provides “Lists” to its users which is similar to the new proposed custom-built timelines. Though individual users have to curate them, and they’ll only include tweets — you won’t see things like search terms and related topics that Twitter can surface on formal timelines.
On mobile, you can also swipe between lists, making them easy to access as alternate timelines.
For now, The Bachelorette is the only custom Timeline available on the web version of the social media platform. The company might extend it to other accounts in the future.
If you happen to be following a custom timeline, Twitter says you will see it listed at the top on the main feed on twitter.com. This is to give web users easier access to a different timeline.
