Twitter introduces custom timelines

Twitter is about to get a whole lot more customizable and personal thanks to the introduction of custom timelines. This latest feature gives users the ability to control exactly what appears in their timeline -- a very interesting alternative to wading through thousands of tweets from the hundreds of accounts you follow. Custom timelines can be used in various ways and offer quick and easy methods of organizing related tweets into a single, manageable stream.

In a post on the Twitter developer blog, Brian Ellin reveals details of the new feature, explaining that:

Each timeline is public and has its own page on twitter.com, making it easy to share so others can follow along in real time as you add more Tweets. And since custom timelines are part of our Twitter for Websites toolkit, you can embed these timelines on your website.

Custom timelines can be used in conjunction with searches and hashtags, collating tweets relating to a particular subject, person or news event. So if you're a fan of The Voice, you might be interested in the timeline created by Carson Daly that collates tweets related to the program. More details can be found in the developer documentation.

It doesn't end there:

There's something more to what we're announcing today: the custom timelines API beta. This new API will open up interesting opportunities, such as programming your custom timelines based on the logic that you choose, or building tools that help people create their own custom timelines, as TweetDeck does.

At the moment you need to use TweetDeck to create a custom timeline, although the Twitter website is all that is needed to view them. Once a timeline has been created, it can be embedded in other websites. Try it out and see what you can come up with -- we'd be interested to see your timelines, so share them below.