It’s now easier than ever to keep track of what’s happening on Twitter in real-time, thanks to instant timeline streaming. The feature is available now in the official Twitter client for Mac.
Twitter, like all social networks, likes to show us a timeline that it thinks we’ll find most engaging. It uses algorithms that try to decide what we’re most interested in. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
It means we typically end up seeing old tweets at the top of our timelines when we first load up the Twitter app. You can change that by switching your view to see the latest tweets first.
Thanks to live timeline streaming in the newest Twitter release, you no longer need to refresh to what’s happening, as it happens.
Twitter adds live timeline streaming on Mac
Timeline streaming is a feature we used to be able to enjoy inside third-party Twitter clients, but it was eliminated when the platform began imposing tighter (and unnecessary) restrictions on developers.
The feature is still available in TweetDeck, a client owned by Twitter, and now you can enjoy it inside the main Twitter app on Mac. There are the simple steps you need to follow to enable it.
- Click the timeline settings button (it looks like a star that sits in the top-right corner of the Twitter app).
- Toggle the new Pin to top option to enable it.
It’s that simple. You will now see new tweets at the top of your timeline as they are posted, and you won’t miss out on breaking news and important updates because you forgot to refresh.
Update your Twitter app today
You’ll need to be running the latest Twitter release — version 8.17 — to see the “Pin to top” toggle. It’s available now from the Mac App Store.
The same functionality is yet to make its way to Twitter on iPhone and iPad, as far as we can tell. But we don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t extend its reach to mobile devices in the future.
