
The Hidden Power of Twitter Custom Timelines - FredericJ
http://xdamman.com/the-hidden-power-of-twitter-custom-timelines
======
gagege
I, and many of the people I follow don't use hash tags in that way. Many never
use them at all. For me, hash tags are useless as metadata. They are often
solely used as jokes.

~~~
afandian
Most popular uses I've seen for hashtags, in order.

1\. Jokes / irony

2\. Abortive attempts to astroturf by advertisers

3\. Everyone's at an event and they've been told to use a particular hashtag

~~~
seiji
4\. public figures using twitter who don't understand how it works.

"I #love twitter and my #followers!" "We had #pickles at the #Senate cafeteria
today lolz!"

~~~
afandian
@seji That must have been #expensive lol!
[http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/eric-
pickles-i...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/eric-pickles-i-
didnt-spend-10000-extra-on-biscuits-8966933.html)

------
shawnreilly
Here is the original twitter dev blog post if anyone wants to see it [1]. I
hope this does not come off an condescending and negative, but my honest
reaction is "What took so long"?? It blows my mind that it took 7 years to
realize/implement this feature.

One of the main reasons I don't regularly use Twitter is because there is too
much white noise. It's hard for me to find information of value because the
comments are all over the place. Even when I follow a strict set of People
specific to an Industry or a Topic, create specific lists, etc; it's still too
much white noise (example; interesting post right next to what someone else
had for breakfast).

I am actually quite frustrated with the entire thing. Being someone interested
in Development and Solving Problems, I know this can be better. And on that
front, it's great to see that this feature finally exists. But there is so
much more that could be done to make it even better. It's frustrating because
the issue relates to a core Twitter experience, which (under [2] API v1.1
Developer Rules of the Road section 1.5) cannot be replicated. So the end
result, I'll probably just have to wait for the customer feedback loop process
to complete (which likely takes a long time). Hopefully in the future I'll see
some of the features that I had once hoped to build myself. Until then, I
probably won't be a regular Twitter user. Frustrating.

If anyone at Twitter reads this, I would be more than happy to describe in
detail some of the ways that I think the timeline can become more relevant and
valuable. I've talked about it here on HN (project name is InfoStream), and it
basically relates to a correlation of GeoLocation Data and Time with relation
to Real World Events.

[1] [https://dev.twitter.com/blog/introducing-custom-
timelines](https://dev.twitter.com/blog/introducing-custom-timelines)

[2] [https://dev.twitter.com/terms/api-
terms](https://dev.twitter.com/terms/api-terms)

~~~
atomi
What Twitter needs to do is implement tweet filtering using regex for your own
timeline. I do this and it's really nice to see regex search results at the
end of the day and not really miss much. It's not as engaging, but who has
time to read every tweet anyway?

------
Pxtl
This actually will be very useful for following products/news/webcomics/etc
online if they develop a convention for using a hashtag on a new release.

Obviously Twitter is a poor-man's RSS, but it's better than nothing.

------
denzil_correa
Twitter is subtly trying to encourage users to add topics (in the form of
hashtags) to their tweets. It has advantages at both ends - from a user
perspective : you can pick and choose topics to follow and from an
advertiser's perspective : you now have more contextual information about the
tweet. It might help you serve better ads and recommendations. However, if
this encourages such a behavior there is a very good chance of lists becoming
obsolete. Rather than lists one would simply create a timeline of users (with
a given hashtag) and share it to the world.

------
evan_
The first use for Custom Timelines I thought of was the kind of themed
collection of tweets you see people retweet sometimes, like this collection of
people who didn't get what they wanted for Christmas a few years ago:

[http://www.buzzfeed.com/daves4/people-who-didnt-get-what-
the...](http://www.buzzfeed.com/daves4/people-who-didnt-get-what-they-wanted-
for-christm)

