Showing favourites or custom timeline

Hi nielsch,

There is currently no support for showing anything other than the default timeline. I have avoided most ‘extra’ functionality to begin with, mostly to avoid making the plugin overly complicated with features that are rarely used. I am always open to suggestions though.

What would you like to use a custom timeline to do? What do you see as the advantage of this? If I can understand how and why it can be used, it will help me to decide if it is worthing supporting.

Thank you for taking the time to query the feature / request it.

Hi Peter,

My request is from the point of view of businesses and brands. They often have multiple people working their Twitter stream resulting a huge amount of tweets. A lot of these tweets are aimed at individuals and are less relevant to visitors of the website or blog. At the same time, you don’t want to filter out mentions and re-tweets entirely because they sometimes contain very valuable comments or testimonials.

Also consider organising tweets by topic. The same twitter account may be used for technical support, service status updates as well as promotions. When displaying tweets on the website it makes sense to show only those that are relevant to the page the visitor is viewing.

Last but not least, while the caching of tweets is a great feature, it also breaks a few business features Twitter offers, like the targeting of specific languages. (E.g. making sure our Chinese or German tweets don’t show up for English users.) The custom timelines would be a great work-around for this as well.

If you’re still not convinced, please also have a look at Twitter’s own examples of this feature: https://dev.twitter.com/blog/introducing-custom-timelines

Thanks for the reply!

Hi nielsch,

Thank you so much for taking the time to explain this fully. I have never used Twitter properly as a business tool, so I find it difficult to see where I can add business valuable features. Which makes feedback like this invaluable.

Using the above information I have been digging through what is possible on Twitter and I can see why this functionality would be valuable.

I cannot make any promises on when it will happen, but you have convinced me that it is worth adding and I will do in the future.

I already have a loose idea of how I could best integrate this functionality into the plugin and I will reply here as I make progress.

Thank you very much for taking the time to offer this feedback, it is very valuable to me and hopefully to many other users in the future too.

You’re welcome! I look forward to future updates.