Collections

Collections give you more control over how Tweets are organized and delivered on the Twitter platform.

Twitter has typically been organized into a few standard timelines: home contains Tweets from accounts you follow, search contains Tweets that match a keyword or term, the user timeline contains Tweets from a specific account, and lists from groups of accounts. These timelines have defined the Twitter experience for the last several years.

Collections are a new type of timeline you control: you create the collection, give it a name, and select which Tweets to add, either by hand or programmatically using the API. Collections are public, have their own pages on twitter.com, and can easily be embedded on your website. The rest is up to you.

How collections work

As a unit, collections operate under the following rules:

  • Collections are created by users.
  • Each collection has a name and description.
  • The collection creator can add any public Tweet to the collection.
  • When new Tweets are added, they appear at the top of the collection by default.
  • Collections are public, have their own URL on twitter.com, and are viewable by all.

By design, collections do not implement specific rules or logic for adding Tweets, leaving that strategy entirely up to you.

What kinds of things can you build with collections?

  • Share the best Tweets from a topic you care about or an event that’s happening right now.
  • Host a Twitter Q&A and give people a place to follow along.
  • Collect the best Tweets about a TV show, and enable viewers to tune-in to your view of the conversation in real-time.
  • Develop agents that organize Tweets you and your friends are most likely to enjoy.

It’s really all up to you.

Getting started with collections

You can begin using collections in a few ways:

1. Create and manage collections from within TweetDeck

Use TweetDeck to create new collections, add Tweets, and follow other people’s timelines as columns. You can learn more about using TweetDeck here.

2. View collections on the web

Each collection has its own unique URL which you can view easily from your desktop or smartphone browser. Timeline URLs are of the form https://twitter.com/user/timelines/collection-id. Here’s a sample collection page, powered by Twitter #music. You can share a collection with others by tweeting its URL, and there’s a Tweet box on the collection page that makes that easy.

3. Embed collections on your website

Collections are supported by Twitter’s standard embedded timeline tools. Click the embed link from within TweetDeck on your column settings, or simply visit the timeline configurator tool to export your collection as a widget.

Here’s an embedded collection from Twitter #music:

4. Learn about the collections API beta

Many features of collections are also available through an API that we’re currently testing with a limited number of beta partners. If you’re interested in programming collections using the BETA API, please consider applying for beta access.