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Twitter

Twitter timelines: how Twitter can capitalise on new feature

By Mark Leiser, Research Fellow

November 13, 2013 | 3 min read

Newly publicly-traded company Twitter has introduced custom timelines to the social media micro-blogging platform. The aim is to give more control over the type of content users see. The new timeline is kind of like Storify on Twitter; users curate the tweets that they want to add by either manually adding to the custom timeline, or through automation delivered by programming the API.

Feature: Twitter's new timeline

The claim is that when a story breaks on Twitter, users can highlight through organising tweets in a timely fashion to give other users an idea of how the story unfolded. Brian Ellin, a product manager at Twitter, claimed the new feature would help users collect the most relevant tweets.

“Share the best tweets about a topic you care about or an event – planned or unplanned – that’s happening now,” he said. “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.”

A blog post from Twitter developers provides examples of how the custom feature would operate. For example, The Voice host Carson Daily created a custom timeline to be a live companion to the show’s latest competition, a Q&A hosted by the Guardian will curate questions from readers and answers from journalists into a custom timeline and Twitter #music created new timelines presenting tweets from music stars, popular songs and the best music vines.

This could help drive traffic if Twitter allows its users to embed the custom timeline onto their own sites. Imagine you or your staff tweeting live from a political convention, or a rapidly evolving new story. The curator assembles tweets from different eye-witnesses or reporters in a manner that helps give readers a full a coherent story of what’s actually going on from multiple angles and perspectives.

Integrating Vine into the automation would provide an important tool for making a hub integrating vantage points into the social media platform. Think “stonewall penalty” Vines competing with “never a penalty” Vines from sporting events. Twitter could direct people to these selected timelines which would help the company’s marketing and profitability - even when embedded onto other websites.

The purchase of MoPub, a mobile advertising exchange that Twitter acquired in September, allows the social media giant to gather data about its users. The data gleamed with help sell adverts on other mobile apps and websites, etc.

Twitter shares, which soared 73 per cent on the first day of trading, dropped to $41.90 on Tuesday. Shares have fallen nine per cent from the opening price but remain far above the initial public offering price of $26.

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