Twitter Exploring New Feature That Lets You Tweet Only to Friends, Block Phrases in Reply, More

BY Mahit Huilgol

Published 2 Jul 2021

Twitter seems to have a ton of new features in the pipeline. The latest report claims Twitter is working on a new feature that allows you to send Tweets to Trusted Friends. In other words, only a specific set of Twitter users will be able to see and respond to your Tweet. This way, the user will be able to decide who can see specific Tweets. Furthermore, Twitter will hide the Tweet from other followers.

Twitter says the feature will help users to streamline their Tweets and deliver them to the right audience. For instance, not everyone might be interested in Tennis; in such case, the user can Tweet only to his friends from the Tennis club. Other followers will not be irritated with uninteresting Tweets.

With the proposed Trusted Friends feature, users could tweet to a group of their own choosing. This could be a way to use Twitter with real-life friends, or some other small network of people you know more personally. Perhaps you could post a tweet that only your New York friends could see when you wanted to let them know you were in town. Or maybe you could post only to those who share your love of a particular TV show, sporting event or hobby.

The company is currently testing these concepts and gathering feedback. In other words, there is no guarantee that the feature will make it to production. Currently, users can choose to limit replies to people mentioned in the Tweet, followers or default that is open to everyone. However, the Tweet will continue to be visible for everyone. Meanwhile, the new Trusted Friends feature will ensure the Tweet is accessible only to the group members.

Twitter’s Trusted Friend feature can throw open a bunch of new possibilities. You can create multiple groups of friends and send highly related Tweets. It could pave the way for increased engagement and less spam. Parallelly, users can continue to have public conversations.

Reply Language Prompts

Twitter users can choose phrases that they don’t want to see in their replies. Twitter will stop the poster from posting replies that contain the blocked phrase. Seems like a good way to weed out profanity and trolls.

Twitter Facets

Twitter Facets feature works backward when compared with Trusted Friends. It allows users to choose the type of Tweets they want to see from you. The irrelevant Tweets will automatically be blocked for the user.

[via TechCrunch]