Twitter is testing out a new-look timeline on its website that brings contextual information for tweets directly into your stream. The new version of the timeline lets you click on tweets to view other tweets in a conversation, view embedded media and see in-line retweets in order to make the service easier to navigate and avoid you having to navigate to another page to view media.

When you hover over a tweet, an “Open” prompt appears to let you expand the contextual information for the tweet. When you click the “Close” prompt, you can hide the contextual information again.

If a tweet you have clicked on is part of a conversation, you’ll be able to view other tweets in the conversation directly in your timeline. In addition, the favorite, reply and delete buttons have been moved to the top-right corner of individual tweets.

Whenever you click on a tweet that contains a link to a photo, video or other media, the media will be expanded within the timeline rather than being displayed in a tab on the right of the timeline. When you click on a tweet that’s been retweeted, you’ll be able to view a list of people who have reshared that tweet with their followers.

Meanwhile, when you click on an person’s Twitter handle, their profile info will be displayed in a pop-up frame on top of your timeline.

Perhaps this new-look timeline is something that Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey had in mind when he returned to the company to oversee product development. It follows on from 4 key members of the company’s product team being let go in July. In June, Twitter added contextual information for tweets sent from several third-party services including Foursquare, Amazon and Gowalla.

It is not yet clear whether Twitter plans to roll out this new-look timeline (which admittedly looks very nice) to all of its users to change the way the service’s more than 100 million monthly active users interact with Twitter. It appears that it is currently being tested among a small number of users.

Here’s a video that shows how the new-look version of the timeline works: