Twitter Is Testing a New ‘Custom Timelines’ Feature — How Does It Work?

The ability to read similar content according to a topic of your choosing on Twitter without any fuzz may soon be in your grasp.

Twitter is reportedly testing a new feature that will allow users to view timelines based on a single topic or interest for quicker content aggregation and filtering without the need to search for them, per Tech Crunch.

The microblogging and social media platforms have yet to disclose a potential release date for the feature in question as it is still being tested by the company's app developers.

Twitter 'Custom Timelines' Feature Testing Details

Twitter's head of product for developing platforms, Amir Shevat, recently tweeted on his official Twitter page that he and his team have launched a new custom timeline experiment that combines tweets about a topic of interest and groups them together in a custom timeline built by the company's developers.

The new "custom timelines" feature is said to be able to find and gather together content that consists of tweets and other media pulled from accounts, hashtags, and more into a timeline for a given topic.

In this case, Shevat used the show "The Bachelorette" as a central topic for the first custom timeline he and his team made to test out the new feature.

This experimental custom timeline can be seen by a "small group" of people in the US and Canada for two weeks as a "limited test," per Shaokyi Amdo's correspondence with The Verge.

Additionally, those who can access the only custom timeline, for now, can do so from an in-app prompt, which will show up for some people who follow related topics and accounts.

The feature is currently algorithmically served, but the option to switch to a reverse chronological feed is not available at the time of this article's publication.

Additionally, a Twitter support page mentioned that content appearing in a custom timeline is selected and ordered based on a content's relevance to the timeline's theme using data gathered from search terms, topics, handles, and manual curation.

Amdo also added that although the custom timelines feature is still being tested, the people on Twitter are excited to learn from the test they're conducting to give people options to "participate in the public conversation and greater choice over the content they see on Twitter."

Alternatives For Twitter's Custom Timeline Feature

If you want to have a custom timeline of your own without waiting for the official feature's release, you may want to try building one by way of Twitter's lists.

Lists let you curate a selection of accounts that can be pinned on the mobile app and viewed by swiping between them on the home screen. However, the timeline created by using lists is based on a stream of tweets by accounts you included in the list. As such, you are unable to do any more involving content curation or filtering.

On the other hand, you can use the new TweetDeck preview to make a custom column from a hashtag or a search term with advanced search features, such as specific words and timeframe.

You can also do this yourself using TweetDeck on the web.