The much talked about Mute button feature on Twitter continues to create a stir among users worldwide, and people are waiting for answers if the company even plans to roll out the long-awaited feature to the popular micro-blogging site.
It was earlier reported that the Mute button is a feature that-when rolled out-will allow Twitter users to unfollow the tweets or retweets of a particular user that possibly irritate them, without entirely blocking the user for whatever reason they can't entirely just do so. When the particular user is muted, all updates will no longer appear on the blocker's newsfeed. Notifications and direct messages are still allowed, and users will have to struggle with it still. However, like Facebook's Unfollow button, the blocked user will not know that another user unfollowed their updates, which makes it subtler than completely blocking the person.
Research says the test run is only among the selected fortunate few, possibly to the more popular users of Twitter. To check out if the test run works on users' end, they should visit any profile using the mobile app and click the gear icon. If it does work, the mute button should show up at the top of the menu.
Yet it appears that users aren't seeing any answers soon, as until now the Mute button is still on a test run. Twitter previously ran tests on several features to some users but in the end was never officially rolled out to everyone. In fact, a Twitter executive once posted their explanation to this.
"We've tested various features with small groups of our 200 million users before determining what we'll release," Twitter engineering vice president Alex Roetter writes in a blog post in September last year.
Other observers are also saying they wouldn't be all too surprised if topics and hashtags were also added to the mute button list before the worldwide release. Why not, those hashtags can really be annoying sometimes.
The mute button is nothing new really, as third-party apps like TweetDeck and Tweetbot already have such feature in their platform. However, these apps aren't viewable on all platforms, thus muting isn't seen on all devices as well.
For now, users will have to deal with those unnecessary tweets, change their account or else block the annoying user entirely.
Here's a sample profile with the Mute button as taken from Twitter user @missambear:
