Twitter Announces Custom Timelines For Hashtags Or Topics On Tweetdeck, Launching API Too

Twitter will let you create custom timelines based on topics, hashtags and more from Tweetdeck, it announced today. Twitter is also providing an API to allow developers to build this functionality into their products.

This will allow people to create powerful streams of information out of Twitter’s public firehose, effectively allowing anyone to curate individual streams of data tailored to a topic. The topics could be literally anything that’s contained in a tweet, including hashtags, a phrase like ‘drinking coffee’ or event-specific keywords like ‘Superbowl’ or ‘TC Disrupt’.

The ability to create custom timelines in Tweetdeck is rolling out slowly, so not everyone will have it right away. This is apparently in an effort to educate people about the new capabilities of custom timelines and to see how people are using them. Not all of Twitter’s consumer products will get this feature right away. If it’s successful, however, it could definitely expand to other products.

Twitter’s Brian Ellin says that the custom timelines are ‘entirely new’. “You name it, and choose the Tweets you want to add to it, either by hand or programmatically using the API…This means that when the conversation around an event or topic takes off on Twitter, you have the opportunity to create a timeline that surfaces what you believe to be the most noteworthy, relevant Tweets.”

Every timeline will have its own permalink page that you can refer users to on Twitter.com. That makes it easy to share and shuffle them around and refer people to them. They’re also completely embeddable.

Over the past few months, the ‘tweet collection’ tool Storify has been expanding to other networks like Facebook in an effort to allow people to create stories around all kinds of social media. That seems wise at this point as many of the use cases of Storify appear to be covered by Twitter’s new custom timelines.

You’re able, for instance, to create a custom timeline in Tweetdeck and drag-and-drop individual tweets to it if you wish. Any custom timelines you create will show up in your profile card in Tweetdeck, and users can view them from there.