Twitter considers new features for tweeting only to friends, under different personas, and more – ProWellTech

Twitter has a history of sharing feature and design ideas that it takes into account at the very early stages of development. For example, earlier this month it showed concepts around a potential “no mention” feature that would allow users to distance themselves from other people’s tweets. Today the company is share a few more design explorations that will give users more control over who can see their tweets and who ends up in their replies. New concepts include a way to tweet only to a group of trusted friends, new prompts that encourage people to reconsider the language they use when posting a response, and a “personas” feature that allows you to do so , based on your different contexts – like tweets about your work life, your hobbies and interests and so on.

The company says it is rethinking these concepts and is trying to collect feedback now to let them know what it might come up with later.

The first of the new ideas builds on work that began last year with the release of a feature that allows an original poster to choose who can reply to their tweet. Nowadays, users can choose to limit replies to just the people mentioned in the tweet, the people they follow, or leave the default setting to “everyone”. But while this allows users to narrow down the options for responding, anyone can see the tweet for themselves. And they can like, retweet or quote the post.

With the proposed Trusted Friends function, users can tweet to a group of their choice. This could be a way to share Twitter with real friends or some other small network of people you know more personally. Maybe you could post a tweet that only your New York friends can see when you want to let them know you’re in town. Or maybe you could just post to those who share your love for a particular TV show, sporting event, or hobby.

Credit: Twitter

This ability to have private conversations alongside public ones could increase people’s usage of Twitter and even encourage some people to tweet for the first time. But it could also be disruptive to Twitter as it would destroy the company’s original idea of ​​a platform that is some kind of public message board that everyone is invited to join the conversation. Users may start thinking about whether or not their post is worth publicly sharing and decide to withhold more of their content in front of the wider Twitter audience, which could impact Twitter engagement metrics. It also brings Twitter closer to Facebook territory, where only a few posts are meant for the world while more are only shared with friends.

Twitter says the benefit of this private, “friends-only” format is that it could save people the workarounds they are currently using – like juggling multiple legacy accounts or switching between public and private tweets.

Another new feature that is being considered is the answer language prompts. This feature would allow Twitter users to choose phrases that they don’t want to see in their responses. When someone writes back to the original poster, those words and phrases are highlighted and a prompt explains why the original poster does not want to see that type of language. For example, users could configure them to display prompts when someone uses profanity in their response.

The feature wouldn’t stop the poster from tweeting its response – it’s more of a gentle nudge asking them to be more considerate.

These “nudges” can have an impact. For example, when Twitter launched a nudge that suggested users read an article before retweeted it, it found that users were 40% more likely to open articles before sharing them. But in the case of someone determined to troll, it may not do that much good.

The third and perhaps most complicated function Twitter calls “facets”.

This is an early idea for tweeting different personas from one account. The feature would be useful for those who frequently tweet about various aspects of their life, including their work life, sideline jobs, private life or family, passions and more.

Credit: Twitter

Unlike Trusted Friends, where you could restrict some tweets to a more personal network, Facets would give other users the option to choose whether to follow all of your tweets or just those with the “facet” they are interested in This way, you can follow someone’s tweets about tech but ignore the reactions they post while watching their favorite team. Or, you could follow your friends’ personal tweets but ignore their work-related content. And so on.

This is an interesting idea because Twitter users have always worried about alienating some of their followers by posting off-topic, so to speak. This also poses the problem of determining which tweets should show which users to the end user himself. Users can be better served with the algorithmic timeline, which understands what content they are dealing with and which they tend to ignore. (Also: “Facets ?!”)

According to Twitter, none of the three features are still under development. These are just design mockups that showcase ideas that the company has been considering. It’s also not yet decided whether or not any of the three will go into development – this is what the user feedback it hopes to get will help determine this.