Do custom timelines spell the end of Twitter Lists?

November 13, 2013

Not to be outdone by updates from competitive platforms, Twitter announced its new custom timeline capabilities within TweetDeck. Now users can collect, organise and categorise related or relevant tweets into one new, seamless feed.

In truth, it’s very much like Storify, which makes you wonder what they think of the development! But users may well rejoice at the opportunity. Why so?

Because custom timelines offer what Twitter Lists can’t: better use of embedded tweets. This could give users and brands more opportunity in terms of reach and better control of outside posts. Now you can hand pick the tweets to share with your followers, and you can embed them elsewhere. On your website, for instance.

The down side is that it can be time-consuming to add every tweet to your timeline – one at a time – but as the new feature moves out of beta testing we can surely expect automatic curation. And best of all we can create custom timelines for hashtags, a feature not available with Twitter Lists.

Visit Carson Daly’s profile to see how he is trying out the new feature:

Big thanks @Twitter for letting me be one of the first to use their brand new Custom Timeline Feature-It’s genius! https://t.co/nSvPMDkwVi

— Carson Daly (@CarsonDaly) November 13, 2013

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