What you need to know
- Twitter begins testing a new custom-built timeline feature.
- This feature, available to a "small group of people," will see The Bachelorette having its first go with it.
- Those following a custom timeline will see it listed at the top of their home timeline to allow web users easier access to a different timeline.
Twitter has begun testing a potential new feature for the social media platform. The company is beginning a test for "custom-built timelines."
The purpose of this new custom-built timeline feature is for users to scroll through content about one specific topic. The content, per Twitter's help center, "is selected and ordered based on relevance to the Timeline's theme using information like search terms, Topics, handles, and manual curation." Accessing a custom timeline will be similar to how lists appear on Twitter's mobile app. At the top of the timeline, there will be "Home" and whatever the title of your added custom-built timeline is.
Twitter users on a computer lack the tab-switching ability mobile users have for pinned lists. With this proposed custom timeline idea, Twitter is looking to bring that feature along with a more custom-built content timeline to those on a computer.
According to The Verge, The Bachelorette custom timeline will be the first in this test. Twitter Spokesperson Shaokyl Amdo told The Verge, "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 U.S. and Canada."
Today we launched a new custom Timeline experiment - just one of the many things we’re working on over at @TwitterDev 🚀 There is a lot of potential for the developer community to build features like this in the future, and we are just getting started. Congrats to the team!🌹 pic.twitter.com/sFToIN7a2sJuly 11, 2022
Twitter already provides "Lists" to its users which appears to be in close proximity with the new proposed custom-built timelines. Twitter developer, Amir Shevat, brought some more details about this new experiment bringing "more flexibility in terms of what to show and what not to show."
Lists on Twitter are created by individual users and contain tweets from accounts about a particular topic. A third-party creator of these custom timelines will have the ability to customize the timeline so people following it will only see what pertains to that specific topic. With the proposed custom timelines being more specific on a topic, it appears to cut down on a person spending time throwing in Twitter accounts that deal with a certain topic.
