Twitter declares war on Storify, whips out custom curated timelines

Twitter is introducing custom timelines - its first significant new service since the micro-blogging site floated on Wall Street last week.

It means that anyone can set up their own timeline containing tweets from a choice of sources they may want to publicly share about a particular event.

Twitter said:

Share the best Tweets about a topic you care about, or an event - planned or unplanned - that’s happening right now. Whether you want to collect the best Tweets about a TV show or help people find the latest information about fast-moving real-time situations, custom timelines let you give everyone a place to follow along.

The company said that it was additionally offering the service as an API beta for developers to mine deeper into custom timelines. But that option is only available to a small number of partners at present.

The new custom timelines sound similar to Storify, a social curation tool that allows users to create timelines from hand-picked content. Unlike Twitter's latest offering, however, Storify can be used to curate content from other social networks – as you can see in this Storify about Prince Charles visiting India, which features Twitter, Instagram and YouTube embeds.

Anyone wanting to create a bog-standard custom timeline in Twitter can do so via TweetDeck – the UK-developed social media dashboard that Twitter bought for $40m and then folded into its own operation. ®