In the past few hours, a new investigation by leakers has uncovered, on the Twitter web, a limited test regarding personalized feeds, curated by third parties, which can be consulted alongside the main timeline according to a tabbed navigation system.
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For some time, Twitter has been carrying out decidedly revolutionary tests, just think of the Blue subscription or the recent Notes function, to allow you to publish articles very similar to those of a blog, longer than the current and binding 280 characters. The news, however, for the blue canary coveted by Elon Musk, did not stop there.
The famous leaker Jane Manchun Wong, in the past few hours, has reported on a small variation released by Twitter that, now, on the mobile side, has changed the sound that is heard for a few moments when updating the timeline by dragging it down and releasing it: the new effect introduced, compared by some to the croaking of a digital frog, does not seem to have received much support so far. Much more important, therefore, was found to be Wong’s second discovery, in this case relating to a test underway with some users who, in the USA and Canada, use the web based version of the platform.
Last May, a first investigation conducted by Wong revealed how the team of CEO Parag Agrawal was working on “Content control tools” which, made available to third parties, would have allowed to improve the in-app experience in various ways, including the provision of “custom timelines”. The latter concern the test in progress.
The typical example is that of the “popular videos” timeline: a prompt will allow you to adopt this chronology (which through a specific option can also be removed), showing it parallel to the main one, in a separate tab, which will also report the third party that takes care of this chronology. The tweets within this custom timeline will be “selected and sorted based on relevance to the timeline theme using information such as search terms, topics, usernames and manual editing”.
Twitter, at the moment, has not yet responded to a request for comment on the matter made by the colleagues of Android Central, despite what was discovered is explained in its (later removed) support page (however available on archive.org: shorturl.at/ cnDIN).