As an internet advertising professional, I have always felt that the tools available to monitor Twitter are inadequate. Their search functionality is rudimentary and keyword-based. Also, there is not much logic or automation that can be applied natively to the tweets. In such a scenario, does the latest Custom Timelines promise any respite? Let’s find out…

Make no mistake about it, this update is aimed squarely to improve the lives of advertisers on Twitter. However, like most things are, it is projected to make the regular users believe it will be good for them.

Looks like Twitter’s Custom Timelines feature is unique in two ways:

• It finally allows for a better search of Twitter for tweets that are relevant to brands — either on a hashtag level or a keyword level. This can thankfully be handled by the API
• It allows for a way to display this stream of tweets either on a webpage or in a twitter-client

While some can quantify that this is progress in the right direction, I believe this is still too little, too late. I believe we are still lagging when it comes to search functionality and emotion-tracking of tweets. I believe the market is still open for someone to build a Twitter client that can be programmed to display a certain-type of tweets based on time, geography, mood, follower count and intent-level.

Until then, Twitter is just moving along at an evolutionary scale and the internet advertising professional in me will remain unimpressed.