Twitter begins testing custom-built timelines to streamline conversations

Micro-blogging site Twitter has begun testing a potential new feature "custom-built timelines," beginning first with one focused on The Bachelorette.

According to The Verge, the idea is that they are topic-focused timelines users can swipe or click on from their main feed so they can scroll through the conversation about a specific subject.

"Today we launched a new custom Timeline experiment, just one of the many things we are 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!" Amir Shevat, Twitter's head of Product for its developer platform tweeted.

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, Twitter spokesperson Shaokyi Amdo tells The Verge.

Those who can access it can do so from an in-app prompt, and that prompt will show up for certain people who follow related topics and accounts, the report said.

Content in the custom timelines will be algorithmically served, but there is no option right now to switch to a reverse chronological feed.

"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," according to Twitter's support site.

"While this is still an early exploration of the potential that custom third-party Timelines can bring to the people who use Twitter, we're excited to learn from this test as we look to give people more ways to participate in the public conversation, and greater choice over the content they see on Twitter," Amdo said.

--IANS

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