Bluesky isn’t the only company leaning on AI to help create custom streams, it seems. In the midst of a shale of recent ones product publicationsX announced this week the launch of Grok-powered custom timelines, which let you dive into one of 75 specific topics via curated streams that can be pinned to your home tab.
The company touted the feature as one of the “biggest changes” to the app to date, saying it uses Grok’s AI to not only create these custom schedules but also personalize them for individual users.
Custom streams are arriving at the same time X announced they are closing the X Communitiesa feature that allowed people to create their own member-based communities around various topics, but saw a decline in usage.
In X, the company’s product manager, Nikita Bier, noted that custom schedules work even better for topics you’re already working on. An X representative explained to TechCrunch that the custom timelines are not based on traditional signals like keywords or hashtags. Instead, the company said, Grok reads each post, understands it, and then adds topic tags. This is made possible by AI models from Grok owner xAI, the company that acquired X last year, linking the two services even closer.
At launch, custom timelines are only available to Premium subscribers on iOS. Android support is in the works. All Premium membership levels have access to this feature.
To use the feature, simply swipe right past the For You and Following feeds on X, as well as any other personal lists you may have pinned. Then tap the plus sign ( + ) to choose which custom timelines you want to pin to your home tab. (Choose wisely, because you can only pin up to 10 topics or lists!)
You can also rearrange the selected themes from the same screen.
Once pinned, you can tap on any of the feeds from your home tab on all platforms to browse your pinned custom feeds.
Notably, the second position in each stream was occupied by an ad β which suggests that X just found a way to increase its ad inventory. This one matters: X’s ad business allegedly was struggling from acquiring Musk, with contradictory exhibitions about whether things have improved.
X’s custom schedules offer 75+ category options
The initial topics are broad and fairly standard β high-level categories similar to the type of sections you might find on news sites. These include topics such as Business & Finance, Sports, Technology, Politics, Stocks & Finance, News, Science, Movies & TV, Food & Drink, Art, Real Estate, Home & Garden, Beauty, Education, Gaming and more.
Beyond the broader sports category, there are also options to follow specific sports such as American football, baseball, basketball, boxing, soccer, golf, MMA & wrestling, racing and motorsports, rugby, snow sports, ice hockey, tennis, cricket, Formula 1, cycling and the Olympics. (Oh, and esports, 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 the Technology category, you can also follow special interests like Artificial Intelligence and Cryptocurrencies β two perennially popular topics on X. There are also categories for things that overlap with Elon Musk’s various businesses and interests, such as robotics, software development, space, and biotech.
Other general categories include things like anime, digital art, photography, career, pets, design, marriage and family, shopping, mental health, and more.
News Categories: War, Crime and Elections
Worth noting: The initial set of news-related topics leads with the conflict in Iran, crime and elections at the top of the sentences.
While this likely reflects current conversations taking place at X, it’s also an example of how a product decision can affect the news people see. A cleaner solution might be to organize the dozens of options into larger, high-level categories listed alphabetically, with subcategories appearing when you click on each one. This would allow X to greatly expand its βnewsβ categories beyond these big three.
There could also be concern about these timelines being built by Grok, who was ostensibly created to be politically neutral and “truth-seeking”, but the practice is often skewed to the right or enhanced misinformation.
In our test however, the adjusted schedules did not appear to be obviously leaning right or left. In a handful of test reels, feeds come from a range of outlets including 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 commentary from various commentators.
Whether these custom flows will dramatically change the way users use X remains to be seen.
For the most part, people tend to want to see the things they care about appear in their main algorithmic feed. However, custom feeds allow you to explore new interests or delve into topics only when they’re relevant β like pulling up a sports stream when the game is on. Combined with the new X of “Postpone mattersβ for the For You stream, you can more precisely customize your X to your liking.
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