Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Bluesky isn’t the only company Tends to artificial intelligence To help create custom feeds, apparently. Middle A List The last project VersionsThis week,
The company described the feature as one of the “biggest changes” to the app yet, saying it uses Grok’s AI to not only create these personalized schedules but also customize them for individual users.
Custom feeds arrive at the same time as X announced Close X communitiesa feature that allowed people to create their own member-based communities around various topics, but has seen a decline in its use.
On X, the company’s head of product, Nikita Bear noted Custom timelines work best for topics you already work with. A representative for X explained to TechCrunch that custom timelines don’t rely on traditional signals like keywords or hashtags. Instead, the company said, Grok reads each post, understands it, and then adds topic labels. This is made possible by AI models from the owner of Grok xAI, a company that I got X last yearlinking the two services more closely together.
At launch, custom timelines are only available to Premium subscribers on iOS. Android support is underway. All premium subscription tiers have access to this feature.
To use this feature, simply swipe right past the For You and Following feeds on the X, as well as any other personal lists you may have pinned. Then tap the plus sign (+) to choose the custom timelines you want to pin to the Home tab. (Choose wisely, because you can only pin up to 10 topics or lists!)
You can also reorder your chosen topics from the same screen.
Once installed, you can click on any of the feeds from the main cross-platform tab to browse through your installed custom feeds.
It is worth noting that the second position in each feed was filled with an ad β indicating that X had just found a way to increase its ad inventory. This is important: X’s advertising business is said to have been Struggling Since Musk’s acquisition of Conflicted Reports About whether things have improved.
X’s custom timelines offer over 75 category options
Primary topics are broad and fairly standard β high-level categories that resemble the type of sections you might find on news sites. These include topics such as business and finance, sports, technology, politics, stocks and economics, news, science, movies and TV, food and drink, art, real estate, home and garden, beauty, education, games, and others.
In addition to the broader sports category, there are also options to follow specific sports, including American football, baseball, basketball, boxing, soccer, golf, mixed martial arts and wrestling, racing, motorsport, rugby, snow sports, ice hockey, tennis, cricket, Formula 1, cycling, and the Olympics. (Oh, and e-sports, if you want to count that.)
Pop culture and technology themes also make up many of the available categories, with the first category allowing you to pin topics such as celebrities, music, concerts, country music, dance, electronic music, fashion, pop, K-pop, J-Pop, podcast, hip-hop, and jazz.
Besides the technology category, you can also follow special interests like artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies β two topics that are always popular on X. There are also categories for things that overlap with Elon Musk’s different works and interests, like robotics, software development, aerospace, and biotechnology.
Other general categories include things like animation, digital art, photography, career, pets, design, marriage, family, shopping, mental health, and more.
News categories: war, crime, elections
Worth noting: The initial set of news-related topics comes with the Iranian conflict, crime and elections at the top of the suggestions.
While this likely reflects current conversations taking place on X, it’s also an example of how a product decision can impact what news people see. A cleaner solution might be to organize the dozens of options into larger, high-level categories listed in alphabetical order, with subcategories appearing when you click on each. This would allow X to expand the βnewsβ categories significantly beyond these three largest categories.
There may also be concern about these timelines set up by Grock, which were ostensibly created to be politically neutral and “truth-seeking”, but in Practice often skewed to the right Or amplify it Wrong information.
However, in our own tests, the custom timelines didn’t seem to be clearly skewed to the right or left. In a few test scripts, feeds were sourced from a range of outlets such as ABC, CBS, CSPAN, AP, Reuters, AFP, Daily Beast, The Hill, Foreign Policy, Puck, The Atlantic, The Economist, Bloomberg, Al Jazeera, Forbes, and the BBC (not all of which I follow), along with comments from various pundits.
It remains to be seen whether these personalized feeds will significantly change how people use X.
More often than not, people tend to want to see things they care about appear in their main algorithmic feed. But personalized feeds allow for the exploration of new interests or delving into topics only when they’re relevant β such as viewing a sports feed when the game is on. “Along with the new X”Postpone topicsFor the For You feed, you can customize X more precisely to your liking.
When you make a purchase through the links in our articles, We may earn a small commission. This does not affect our editorial independence.