Twitter Introduces Custom Timelines, A New Way to Curate Your Favorite Tweets

Twitter announced today a new site feature called Custom Timelines, which allows users to generate and populate a story stream of curated Tweets. It will come first to TweetDeck, an external application for Twitter, but later to the hands of developers around the world.

Custom Timelines are an interesting hybrid of Twitter’s existing Lists feature and Storify (a web app designed with largely the same core goal). Custom Timelines could be used for keeping track of lengthy conversations that might become unlinked, news coverage of an imminent topic, or global response to an event like The Olympics.

Within TweetDeck, you’ll be able to generate a Custom Timeline by simply adding a new column, then filling it with other tweets by dragging and dropping them one-by-one. Your created Custom Timelines will be displayed for others to view on your TweetDeck profile, and they’re as embeddable and shareable as an existing tweet.

This feature will likely find the most use among social networking gurus, but can easily find purpose with photographers logging their Tweeted work, online writers keeping track of engagement of their work that’s posted on Twitter, and many others.

The feature goes live first for TweetDeck’s web, Chrome and PC apps “over the next several days,” but will be available in the Mac app “soon.” When the beta API is released to developers later, considering the feature gains traction, you can look forward to it appearing in more of your favorite Twitter-centric applications.