Twitter is seemingly taking cues from Facebook in terms of user experience. Besides redesigning its main web page that looks so much like Facebook, Twitter is also testing the waters for a muted experience from what could be annoying tweets or followers. It makes sense - Twitter can sometimes be full of unnecessary, irritating tweets.
If Facebook has an "Unfollow" button that makes the account updates of an annoying friend not appear in your timeline without looking rude for doing so and losing entirely the friendship, so has Twitter which is the "Mute" button that quiets down similarly annoying tweets or retweets of a particular user on the site.
Mute is somehow like unfollowing or blocking the updates of another user done secretly, but it looks less harsh than clicking on the "Unfollow" or "Block" button itself. The catch: the other person won't know if you muted them, and you still appear as a follower. The other catch: the mute button doesn't block direct messages and notifications, so yes, they still get to talk to you albeit privately.
The mute button isn't entirely new as third-party apps such as Tweetbot and TweetDeck have mute buttons. Problem is, these apps aren't accessible on every platform, so muting isn't available on all the devices.
Research also reveals the test run came months after the controversial issue on Twitter in which it allowed blocked users to continue reading and retweeting the tweets of the blocker, while the blocker couldn't read the stream of the blocked user. The company, however, went back to its original policy after a public commotion on the issue.
The company though discloses in a blog post in September 2013 that it continues to experiment on features to provide better experience for its users. Some experiments may push through; some may not.
"We also experiment with features that may never be released to everyone who uses Twitter. Those experiments are perhaps even more valuable because they help us decide what not to do -- which is important as we work to keep Twitter simple while improving the user experience. Ultimately, our goal is to learn and keep making the product better; we aren't necessarily looking to launch all of the experiments we roll out," the blog post says.
Research says the mute button isn't official yet as of this writing. The test run is only appearing in some accounts on iOS and Android phones. If it rolls out to users worldwide, it's time to give Twitter a toast and a round of applause for that long-awaited feature.
