Twitter has just gone through a fairly unremarkable IPO, in that there wasn’t much to discuss aside from the increase in stock price. But with an IPO comes investors to satisfy and new features are required to do that so it’s not that surprising that Twitter has announced that custom timelines, arranged by users and sharable via the web, are on the way.
The idea is that users will be able to collect and arrange tweets by subject, or in a completely random manner, and display them for the world. According to Twitter the idea is that “…when the conversation around an event or topic takes off on Twitter, you have the opportunity to create a timeline that surfaces what you believe to be the most noteworthy, relevant Tweets.”
There are two ways to make use of Twitter’s new customisation feature, either through Tweetdeck or by using the company’s new API. The Tweetdeck version of the feature will be rolling out to users in the next few days (though it seems to be active now) and the company has a rundown of how it works here. Long story short though, users will be able to drag and drop tweets in any order to a custom timeline, view it on Twitter’s webpage and then embed the stream of commentary into a webpage if that’s the way they want to do things.
The results could see people using Twitter in ways they hadn’t considered before, as a creative tool rather than a place where they comment, follow and hope for the viral score. The Verge points out that custom timelines aren’t new, Storify has been doing this for some time but Twitter may be looking to take that away from them.
Source: The Verge