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In Twitter\u2019s\u00a0Q3 earnings call<\/a> today, executives dodged a question from an analyst about whether the company could give details\u00a0about any \u201cbig, revolutionary\u201d product changes that might move the needle on Twitter\u2019s sluggish growth<\/a>. But they\u00a0did open the curtains on what might be one\u00a0of the \u201chundreds of small changes\u201d it\u2019s planning in coming months.\u00a0The company is working on ways of making the Timeline, (currently) the heart of Twitter, into a more personal experience, with special-interest views around, say, your favorite sports teams, or the political party you support, as well as more conversational Tweets from your social graph.<\/p>\n In the call today, Twitter CFO Anthony Noto \u2014 who\u00a0can be counted on<\/a> to make strategic\u00a0reveals of what Twitter is thinking about next in these calls \u2014 said that Twitter is working on something that he referred to as an \u201cEvent Timeline\u201d that \u201cbrings the conversation together\u201d around a specific moment or occasion.<\/p>\n These could, for example, run alongside a sporting event that Twitter is streaming, or to accompany something happening off the network. So, if an event in question is a football game, the\u00a0idea would be to coalesce tweets from other fans of your team, or \u201cexpert\u201d commentators.<\/p>\n Another alternative to tailor what you see, Noto added, would be to bring together tweets \u201cfrom your graph\u201d of people you follow.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve just scratched the surface for what we can do here,\u201d Noto said.<\/p>\n He also described Twitter\u2019s ideas for how an interface might look for these more personalized Timelines: they could come in the form of tabs alongside your regular Timeline: \u201cWe can provide a tab for Patriots or Chiefs fans, or just for Republicans or Democrats.\u201d<\/p>\n To develop these personalized views,\u00a0Twitter is tapping into some of the machine learning investments it has been making, said CEO Jack Dorsey. This will be a fundamental shift. \u201cIn the past, we were biased toward helping users find individuals rather than topics and interests,\u201d Dorsey said. \u201cWe can do better there.\u201d<\/p>\n If you based tweets around special interests rather than suggestions of people to follow, it essentially removes the need to figure out who to follow on the platform, which has been one of the gating factors to growing Twitter, and introducing it to new users. It could create a completely different way of discovering content on the platform, while at the same time tapping into some of the topic-based use you already see around existing features like hashtags.<\/p>\n Machine learning, Dorsey also said on the call, is being used to improve notifications and to \u201copen up Twitter\u201d to more users.<\/p>\n Although the machine learning element is new, customized Timelines is not an entirely novel\u00a0idea on Twitter. The company actually introduced a feature called Custom Timelines<\/a>\u00a0back in 2013 \u2014 which let people create links to curated lists of Tweets around specific events, \u00e0 la Storify.<\/p>\n I can\u2019t recall the last time (if ever) that I clicked on a Custom Timeline, but this does indicate one potential starting point for how this might look and act, and also how Twitter or an event holder might be able to control these personalized Tweets.<\/p>\n The concept of more personalized Timelines seems like an obvious addition for a platform that can feel very noisy and aimless at times.<\/p>\n Twitter earlier this year<\/a> already took its first steps into manipulating what users see first when they look at the app when it introduced a new view, where Twitter provided short lists of tweets you might have missed from earlier, above the usual time-based view of all the tweets from\u00a0people you follow. These, too, are surfaced by machine learning algorithms that surface notable tweets\u00a0based on how you already use Twitter and people you follow.<\/p>\n Power users of Twitter, using lists and clients like TweetDeck, have long been curators of content on the platform. Introducing more tabs into the basic Twitter experience could broaden out this kind of use.<\/p>\n And broadening out some of the most popular uses of Twitter\u00a0while taking away some of the wonkier elements \u2014 say by introducing hashtag behavior through tabs but without hashtags \u2014 also taps into another theme at the company. Just yesterday, we noticed that it was testing removing the \u201c@reply\u201d tags from replies that have always eaten into its 140-character limit. (And Twitter has been eyeing ways of removing these features for a while<\/a>, it seems.)<\/p>\n Personalized Timelines could be used for another purpose\u00a0on the platform: Twitter today is facing a lot of scrutiny over how it handles harassment, or mishandles it, as the case may be. It even allegedly lost not\u00a0one<\/a>\u00a0but\u00a0two<\/a>\u00a0acquisition deals over the issue.<\/p>\n