A New Tool to Automatically Refine Twitter Content in Your App

From big games to breaking news, Twitter is a persistent source of relevant, real-time content that can engage your users. With Twitter Kit, you can use Twitter searches and lists to automatically display live timelines of Tweets about any topic in your app.

These timelines provide an easy way to continuously enliven your apps with first-person perspectives and in-the-moment reactions, but we know that you also need control over the content you present to your users. Today we’re announcing an experimental feature in Twitter Kit that enables your app to automatically filter Tweets based on rules you define. It’s available now in the Android 2.3 and iOS 2.7 releases of Twitter Kit.

People are sensitive about reliable sources, refining the content we display is vital to build and maintain their trust in news.”

Vishal Anand@VishalAnandChief Product Officer, Dailyhunt

We’ve heard many examples of how you want to refine the Tweets you display to meet your editorial policies and preferences. The new timeline filter allows you to define a list of terms, URLs, and usernames, and Twitter Kit will hide any content that matches. Now you can get all the benefits of an automated timeline of relevant Tweets, while ensuring that the content is tailored to the tone of your app.

The new functionality also allows you to store filters in a standalone configuration file. Reuse filters across timelines in your app, use the same configuration in iOS and Android versions of Twitter Kit, collaborate on terms within your team, and share them with other developers. We’ve also designed flexibility into this system: bake the configuration into your app binary, or pull down updates from your server or a public source.

We hope this functionality gives you the power to engage your users with Twitter content, with the peace of mind of knowing that you control what appears in your app. This is an experimental feature, so we will continue iterating on it based on your feedback; we want to ensure that it fits well with your workflow. Please join the discussion and let us know what you think in the developer forum, or send us feedback using this form. Thank you!