Twitter is taking another step forward in its experiments with new ways to personalize your tweet experienceusing different algorithms to highlight content most relevant to your interests.
As you can see in this screenshot, Twitter has launched a new personalized timeline for The Bachelorette TV show, which will allow select fans to follow along with topic-specific tweets. through an alternative in-app news feed.
The Bachelorette timeline, created in partnership with ABC, will be available for a small group of people in the US and Canada for 10 weeks, the length of the show’s season. Some users who already follow topics and trends related to The Bachelorette will be prompted to add the new timeline, which will provide an easier way to stay on top of related conversations on the app.
Twitter is still developing it custom timeline accesswhich will eventually see third-party providers able to create their own feeds of tweets, which they can then curate – manually or automatically – to help maximize engagement around certain topics.
As described by I tweet:
“Custom timelines are curated resources. These feeds may be created by third parties that curate and provide content about interests and events, or by Twitter based on general knowledge. For example, the popular video timeline created by Twitter uses information similar to how we select topics to populate and order video content.”
Simple topic navigation, with alternative feeds accessible via a left swipe, will make it easier to stay up-to-date with topics of interest, as opposed to having to search for hashtag feeds yourself. Hashtag feeds also won’t be as personalized as these lists, since those feeds are just a big load of all the tweets that include your chosen term.
Custom timelines are built with their own algorithmic parameters, which will make them a completely unique experience on every screen.
Interestingly, former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey adopted almost this exact approach to timeline management last August, when he described how he uses the third-party tool ‘Vicariously’ to curate a stream of tweets last.
I used it @getvicarious to create and sync a list of all the accounts I’m following, set that list to reverse, named it “Recent” and set it, and now I can quickly slide between the order (algorithm) and all tweets when OCCUR
(inspired by an idea from the team) pic.twitter.com/ZfSg9pGeds
— jack (@jack) August 12, 2021
Which, at the time, seemed strange. If this is a significant enough UI problem in the app you’re responsible for, why not fix it internally and provide a better user experience?
In fairness, Twitter has provided various options to set up alternative feeds already, including a ‘recent tweets’ timeline, making it easier to switch between different feed screens.
But this new process expands the potential of that process, enabling companies and individuals outside of Twitter to create and curate entirely new feeds.
It’s still early days, and there are still various factors that Twitter will need to build in to facilitate full algorithmic functionality within these slippery streams. But it’s one of the projects Twitter is looking to develop, and one that potentially future CEO Elon Musk is also interested in, based on his tweets.
