What is a Timeline?

A timeline is a Twitter term used to describe a collected stream of Tweets listed in real-time order. This brief article explains a little more about where you see timelines on your Twitter account.

Your Home Timeline

When you log in to Twitter, you'll land on the Timeline view of your homepage, as shown below.

• We often call this your "Home Timeline", because it appears on your homepage.
• Your home timeline is a long stream showing all Tweets from those you have chosen to follow on Twitter.
• Newest messages are at the top. You can interact with messages from within the timeline by hovering your mouse over toreply or retweet (shown at the bottom of this image).
• Clicking anywhere on a Tweet in your timeline pulls open a sidebar, where you can see photos, videos, and profile information related to that message (shown below).

Note: If you see Tweets in your timeline from users you don't follow, check to see if they are retweets. It's likely someone you do follow chose to re-broadcast that message to you because they found it interesting. Retweets do show up in your home timeline.

Other Timelines

• Timelines can also consist of collected messages from users in lists that you've curated or as results of searches that you perform.
• When you click on a list, you will see an aggregated stream of Tweets (a timeline) posted by the users included in that list.
• Similarly, when you perform a search, you'll see a timeline of messages that all match your search terms.