It appears Bluesky isn’t the only company leaning into AI to help build custom feeds. In a spate of recent product releases, X this week announced the release of custom timelines powered by Grok. This allows you to drill down into one of over 75 specific topics through a curated feed that you can pin to your home tab.
The company touted the feature as one of the “biggest changes” to its previous app, saying it uses Grok’s AI to not only build these custom timelines, but also personalize them for individual users.
The custom feed arrived at the same time that X announced the closure of the X Community. XCommunities, a feature that allowed people to create their own member-based communities around a variety of topics, had seen a decline in usage.
For X, Nikita Via, the company’s head of product, said custom timelines work even better for topics you’re already working on. An X representative explained to TechCrunch that custom timelines are not based on traditional signals like keywords or hashtags. Instead, Grok reads every post, understands it, and adds topic labels, the company said. This is made possible by AI models from xAI, the owner of Grok, which acquired X last year, bringing the two services even closer together.
At launch, custom timelines will only be available to premium iOS subscribers. Android support is currently in development. All premium subscription tiers have access to this feature.
To use this feature, simply scroll to the right past X’s “For You” and “Following” feeds and any other personal lists you’ve pinned. Then tap the plus (+) sign and select the custom timeline you want to pin to your Home tab. (You can only pin up to 10 topics or lists, so choose wisely.)
You can also sort your selected topics from the same screen.
Once pinned, you can see your pinned custom feed by tapping any of the feeds from the Home tab across the platform.
Notably, the second position of each feed was filled with an ad. This suggests that X has just found a way to increase its ad inventory. That’s the point: X’s advertising business has reportedly struggled since Musk’s acquisition, and there are conflicting reports about whether things have improved.
Custom Timeline in X offers over 75 category options
The first topic is broad and fairly standard, with high-level categories similar to the types of sections you’d find on a news site. These include Business & Finance, Sports, Technology, Politics, Stocks & Economics, News, Science, Movies & TV, Food & Drink, Art, Real Estate, Home & Gardening, Beauty, Education, Gaming, and more.
Beyond the broader sports categories, you also have the option to follow specific sports such as American football, baseball, basketball, boxing, soccer, golf, mixed martial arts and wrestling, racing and motor sports, rugby, snow sports, ice hockey, tennis, cricket, Formula 1, cycling, and the Olympics. (Oh, and esports, too, if you want to count that.)
Pop culture and technology topics also make up many of the available categories, with the former allowing you to pin topics such as celebrities, music, concerts, country music, dance, electronic music, fashion, pop, K-POP, J-POP, podcasts, hip-hop, and jazz.
In addition to technology categories, you can also follow special interests like artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies, two always popular topics on X. There are also categories of things that overlap with Elon Musk’s various businesses and interests, such as robotics, software development, space, and biotechnology.
Other common categories include anime, digital art, photography, career, pets, design, marriage and family, shopping, mental health, and more.
News Categories: War, Crime, Elections
Worth flagging: The first set of news-related topics, with Iran conflict, crime and elections at the top of the list.
This is likely a reflection of the current conversation happening around X, but it’s also an example of how product decisions can impact the news people see. A cleaner solution is to organize the large number of options into larger, higher-level categories listed alphabetically, with subcategories appearing when you tap on each. This will allow X to significantly expand its “news” category beyond these three big companies.
You may also be concerned that these timelines are built by Grok. Grok was ostensibly created to be politically neutral and “truth-seeking,” but in reality it often distorts true information or amplifies misinformation.
However, in our own testing, the custom timeline didn’t seem to lean noticeably to the right or left. A few test scrolls cited feeds from a variety of news outlets, including ABC, CBS, CSPAN, AP, Reuters, AFP, Daily Beast, The Hill, Foreign Policy, Pac, The Atlantic, The Economist, Bloomberg, Al Jazeera, Forbes, and the BBC (not all of which I follow), along with commentary from various experts.
It remains to be seen whether these custom feeds will dramatically change the way people use X.
Most of the time, people tend to want the things they care about to show up in the main algorithm feed. However, custom feeds allow you to explore new interests or dip into topics only when they are relevant, such as viewing a sports feed during a game. Combined with the new “Snooze Topics” option for X’s For You feed, you can tailor X more precisely to your preferences.
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