Twitter is reportedly working on a new feature that is similar to Instagram's Close Friends. The social media platform shared three early design concepts of the said feature.
Twitter's Possible New Features
Twitter's new feature is called Trusted Friends, allows users to limit the people who can see their selected tweets to a smaller circle of close friends, according to Engadget.
Meanwhile, Twitter's other feature, called Facets could let you categorize your tweets when you send them. The service also considers allowing users to list certain phrases they would rather not see in their Twitter replies.
However, these ideas are still in their early stages, and none of them is in active development yet.
A lot of Twitter users already have multiple accounts to separate their work and personal lives, usually with one of the accounts being private to prevent sharing personal news publicly.
However, the features like Trusted Friends and Facets could allow for the same functionality from a single account, removing the need to create multiple accounts.
Trusted Friends could offer a toggle to let users signify that a tweet should be public or only for close friends. This feature is similar to Instagram's Close Friends.
Facets, on the other hand, offers more granular control. It lets users sort out their tweets into professional and personal categories and specific hobbies or interests that they might have.
Twitter stated that users might then follow someone just for their tweets on a certain topic instead of following their account as a whole.
The final proposed feature would let you specify certain phrases that you would rather not see in the replies to your tweets. The followers would then see the phrases highlighted, alongside a warning not to use this language.
In one of Twitter's screenshots posted by Twitter users A Designer, an offensive word is highlighted alongside a warning.
Although Twitter says that people could ignore the guidance, users would choose to move these types of replies to the bottom of the conversation.
Creating a More Personal Twitter Account
Twitter states that it is not currently actively building any of these mentioned features. Instead, the company hopes that tweeting about the prospects earlier could help them gather feedback from the users while still in its early phases.
In June, Twitter privacy designer Dominic Camozzi tweeted a similar work in progress feature to let users remove themselves from mentions that they are tagged in, according to The Verge.
The announcement of the features came weeks after Twitter began publicly testing a new Tip Jar feature, only for users to discover that it shows the money sender's home address when they use PayPal to transfer money to the receiver's account.
Even though PayPal and not Twitter caused the problem, critics pointed out that Twitter should have given the users more warning when they use the payment feature.
The Tip Jar feature issue is why Twitter is now announcing its plans for features early so that users can discuss the pros and cons before Twitter officially releases it.
Read also: Twitter vs. Misinformation: How Twitter Will Handle Social Media Misinformation with Warning Labels
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Written by Sophie Webster
