<commit_before># The hidden power of Twitter Custom Timelines

What if the new Twitter Custom Timelines could open a new way to follow your interests on Twitter with more signal and less  noise?

Twitter [announced recently a new feature to create custom timelines](https://blog.twitter.com/2013/custom-timelines-in-tweetdeck). This feature allows you to create custom collections of tweets. Those collections appear on your profile (only in Tweetdeck for now) and have [a unique public URL](https://twitter.com/twittermedia/timelines/400355752109293568) that you can share. You can also [embed them on any site](http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2427298,00.asp).

## Twitter Customer Timelines meet hashtags

What if every time you would use a hashtag, it would automatically add your tweet to a collection with the name of the hashtag? (If it's the first time that you use that hashtag, it will first create a new custom timeline for you.)

This has two direct benefits:
- You can easily look back to all your tweets about a given conference or on a given topic (e.g. all my tweets with #sxsw or with #startup)
- Other users can quickly see on your profile what you are mostly tweeting about recently

But most importantly, it opens the door to **allow other users to only follow a subset of your tweets**. E.g. you could follow only my tweets about startup ([follow @xdamman#startup](https://twitter.com/xdamman/timelines/403231422728503296)) or only my tweets in French ([@xdamman#fr](https://twitter.com/xdamman/timelines/403232035851890689)). Reversely, you could follow all my tweets but unfollow my tweets about #sxsw. 

![Modified Tweetdeck screenshot: Follow a custom feed](http://f.cl.ly/items/023B3a2n1J1S2e0A3f0J/Screen%20Shot%202013-11-24%20at%201.25.29%20PM.png)

### Perfect for alerts, promotions, ...
[Twitter already offers an alert mechanism](https://blog.twitter.com/2013/twitter-alerts-critical-information-when-you-need-it-most), but it's only available for a limited number of accounts. With this new follow paradigm, Twitter could scale that feature to everyone. Anyone should be able to send an #alert and it should be up to your followers to follow or unfollow them. E.g. I don't want to follow all the tweets from [@nytimes](http://twitter.com/nytimes) but I'd be happy to follow @nytimes#alerts. I should also be able to configure it in such a way that those alerts get pushed to me.

Promotions is another great use case for this. I don't want to follow [@amazon](http://twitter.com/amazon) but I wouldn't mind following @amazon#blackfriday. 

### A better interest graph
By allowing to follow a subset of someone's tweets, you effectively **reduce the cost of following**. As a result, I would expect people to follow more feeds and therefore build a deeper interest graph (which is good to improve ad targeting.)

### Conclusion
Despite the current limitations, the new Twitter Custom Timelines have the potential to change the way we use Twitter. Custom Timelines could be the foundation for a new follow mechanism on Twitter that I believe would greatly improve the signal to noise ratio. Something that many Twitter users have been craving for a long time. Time will tell but I can't wait to see what Twitter will do with this. 
<commit_msg>h2 instead of h3<commit_after># The hidden power of Twitter Custom Timelines

What if the new Twitter Custom Timelines could open a new way to follow your interests on Twitter with more signal and less  noise?

Twitter [announced recently a new feature to create custom timelines](https://blog.twitter.com/2013/custom-timelines-in-tweetdeck). This feature allows you to create custom collections of tweets. Those collections appear on your profile (only in Tweetdeck for now) and have [a unique public URL](https://twitter.com/twittermedia/timelines/400355752109293568) that you can share. You can also [embed them on any site](http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2427298,00.asp).

## Twitter Customer Timelines meet hashtags

What if every time you would use a hashtag, it would automatically add your tweet to a collection with the name of the hashtag? (If it's the first time that you use that hashtag, it will first create a new custom timeline for you.)

This has two direct benefits:
- You can easily look back to all your tweets about a given conference or on a given topic (e.g. all my tweets with #sxsw or with #startup)
- Other users can quickly see on your profile what you are mostly tweeting about recently

But most importantly, it opens the door to **allow other users to only follow a subset of your tweets**. E.g. you could follow only my tweets about startup ([follow @xdamman#startup](https://twitter.com/xdamman/timelines/403231422728503296)) or only my tweets in French ([@xdamman#fr](https://twitter.com/xdamman/timelines/403232035851890689)). Reversely, you could follow all my tweets but unfollow my tweets about #sxsw. 

![Modified Tweetdeck screenshot: Follow a custom feed](http://f.cl.ly/items/023B3a2n1J1S2e0A3f0J/Screen%20Shot%202013-11-24%20at%201.25.29%20PM.png)

## Perfect for alerts, promotions, ...
[Twitter already offers an alert mechanism](https://blog.twitter.com/2013/twitter-alerts-critical-information-when-you-need-it-most), but it's only available for a limited number of accounts. With this new follow paradigm, Twitter could scale that feature to everyone. Anyone should be able to send an #alert and it should be up to your followers to follow or unfollow them. E.g. I don't want to follow all the tweets from [@nytimes](http://twitter.com/nytimes) but I'd be happy to follow @nytimes#alerts. I should also be able to configure it in such a way that those alerts get pushed to me.

Promotions is another great use case for this. I don't want to follow [@amazon](http://twitter.com/amazon) but I wouldn't mind following @amazon#blackfriday. 

## A better interest graph
By allowing to follow a subset of someone's tweets, you effectively **reduce the cost of following**. As a result, I would expect people to follow more feeds and therefore build a deeper interest graph (which is good to improve ad targeting.)

## Conclusion
Despite the current limitations, the new Twitter Custom Timelines have the potential to change the way we use Twitter. Custom Timelines could be the foundation for a new follow mechanism on Twitter that I believe would greatly improve the signal to noise ratio. Something that many Twitter users have been craving for a long time. Time will tell but I can't wait to see what Twitter will do with this. 

{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.06846599573040561, 'fraction_numerical': 0.034156755108264714, 'mean_word_length': 4.615582191780822, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 3, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 3, 'https://': 10, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 2, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
{'dir': 'git-commits-cleaned', 'id': '3222293', 'n_tokens_mistral': 1900, 'n_tokens_neox': 1690, 'n_words': 923}