Twitter introduced a tool Tuesday, called custom timelines, that allows its users to drag and drop tweets to form custom lists of Twitter messages on whatever topic interests them.
The idea — to make it easy for anyone to create a “best of Twitter” list — could be especially appealing to news organizations and other heavy users of Twitter who constantly scan the service looking for interesting nuggets and then share them with their own followers and fans.
A user of custom timelines could create a list of anything on Twitter, from news about major events, like the destruction caused by Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, to less weighty matters like the best cat jokes ever tweeted.
“Whether you want to collect the best tweets about a TV show or help people find the latest information about fast-moving real-time situations, custom timelines let you give everyone a place to follow along,” wrote Brian Ellin, a product manager at Twitter, in a blog post announcing the tool.
Custom timelines also help Twitter address one of its biggest problems: it’s often hard to find meaning amid the chaos of half a billion tweets a day.
Essentially, Twitter is hoping to enlist its most dedicated fans as tour guides. The company said the political news site Politico, the British newspaper The Guardian and Carson Daly, host of “The Voice,” are early users of the timeline tool.
Each timeline is public and has its own page on Twitter.com. Users can keep adding new tweets to them.
Initially, custom timelines will have to be put together using TweetDeck, a Twitter-owned software program that sorts tweets into columns. But Twitter said it would share the technical information necessary for developers to create their own tools and even write programs to automatically collect, say, all tweets with a particular hashtag, sent by certain accounts or with particular keywords in the tweet.
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