You may soon be able to organize Twitter’s web of hashtags and handles in a smarter way, that is if the company can pull off its ambitious new rethinking of the app’s timelines.
The company isn’t getting rid of the process of a following users but at a press event in SF, company execs announced that they are planning to push users to start following “topics” that bring in well-engaged tweets from a variety of accounts that the user might not necessarily follow. Twitter is currently testing these on Android with topics around sports from MMA to Formula 1 to specific professional franchises.
The company plans to greatly expand the scope so that fans will be able to have timelines devoted to BTS and skincare routines.
The company is curating the overall topics manually, but Twitter will be relying on machine learning to intelligently populate the topics themselves so that the tweets can stay up to date. These followed topics can live in your central timeline, but you’ll also be able to create your own secondary timelines that you can bring multiple topics, accounts and hashtags into.
A feature that’s Twitter says it is also currently experimenting with is the ability to temporarily unfollow a topic so you can keep certain tweets out of your timeline like tweets chronicling an ongoing finale of a TV show or a football game.
Developing
