By Alex Laughlin
HLNtv.com
(CNN) — Twitter announced Tuesday the beta version of custom timelines, a new feature similar to the social aggregation tool Storify, which is frequently used by journalists to tell stories using social media.
With the new tool, “you have the opportunity to create a timeline that surfaces what you believe to be the most noteworthy, relevant Tweets,” the microblogging site said in a post on its developer blog.
Here are five things you should know about custom timelines:
1. Timelines are more about telling a story than consuming one. You collect tweets based on hashtag, user or topic, and compile them into one timeline that you can share with your friends.
2. Users create and manage custom timelines within TweetDeck, so you have to create an account there in order to have access to the new feature.
3. Unlike the regular Twitter timeline, displayed tweets do not update immediately; only you can decide what is shown.
4. You can add public tweets to your timelines even if you don’t follow the users.
5. Timelines can be viewed on Twitter or embedded into websites.
The-CNN-Wire
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