Custom timelines come to Twitter

Twitter announced today a new feature for its services that will initially be active only on Tweetdeck: the feature will allow users to create custom timelines in which they can select which messages to include. The timelines can then be shared with other users or even embedded into your personal webpage.

To create a custom timeline, you now have a new option when you go to create a new column. After doing this, you’ll be able to publish any post from any other timeline on the custom one, either by dragging and dropping the post or by using the new option on the drop-down advanced options button for each tweet. You can also delete them in the same way whenever you want.

The differences between these timelines and lists are pretty clear. You can share your custom timelines much more easily, either by sharing a custom URL with the Tweetdeck user profile or even by integrating it into a webpage with an embed code. When you click on the “Share” button in the custom column a configuration menu will open where you can both see the timeline in Twitter and generate a web code to paste into your webpage based on a series of preferences such as the color or the width of the column.

Though the official announcement was made today, these features will progressively become available to all users over the next few days. Nevertheless, there are already a few sites where you can see the results, such as this custom timeline for the American version of the TV series The Voice or these thematic news timelines integrated into the Politico website. The possibilities are manifold when it comes to offering thematic tweet feeds and the immediacy of Twitter makes this new feature even more promising.