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Twitter Considers New Features For Tweeting Only To Friends, Under Different Personas and More (techcrunch.com) 11

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Twitter has a history of sharing feature and design ideas it's considering at very early stages of development. Earlier this month, for example, it showed off concepts around a potential "unmention" feature that would let users untag themselves from others' tweets. Today, the company is sharing a few more of its design explorations that would allow users to better control who can see their tweets and who ends up in their replies.

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's allowed to reply to their tweet. Today, users can choose to limit replies to only people mentioned in the tweet, only people they follow, or they can leave it defaulted to "everyone." But even though this allows users to limit who can respond, everyone can see the tweet itself. And they can like, retweet or quote tweet the post. 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. Twitter says the benefit of this private, "friends only" format is that it could save people from the workarounds they're currently using -- like juggling multiple alt accounts or toggling between public to protected tweets.

Another new feature under consideration is Reply Language Prompts. This feature would allow Twitter users to choose phrases they don't want to see in their replies. When someone is writing back to the original poster, these words and phrases would be highlighted and a prompt would explain why the original poster doesn't want to see that sort of language. For instance, users could configure prompts to appear if someone is using profanity in their reply. The feature wouldn't stop the poster from tweeting their reply -- it's more a gentle nudge that asks them to be more considerate. The third, and perhaps most complicated, feature is something Twitter is calling "Facets." This is an early idea about tweeting from different personas from one account. The feature would make sense for those who often tweet about different aspects of their lives, including their work life, their side hustles, their personal life or family, their passions and more. Unlike Trusted Friends, which would let you restrict some tweets to a more personal network, Facets would give other users the ability to choose whether they wanted to follow all your tweets, or only those about the "facet" they're interested in. This way, you could follow someone's tweets about tech, but ignore their stream of reactions they post when watching their favorite team play. Or you could follow your friend's personal tweets, but ignore their work-related content. And so on.

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Twitter Considers New Features For Tweeting Only To Friends, Under Different Personas and More

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  • If you set your account to private, can everyone still see the tweet?
    • If you set your account to private, can everyone still see the tweet?

      That's what is so sad about all of this. This is not any new technology or innovation. How many of us were communicating with people in this manner in 1991? Hell, even FidoNet managed this kind of thing when the average person hadn't even heard of the Internet.

      • Sorry. That was supposed to be in response to "So, this is like email?" :)
        • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

          Well no, like chat so more like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org].

          Twitter has forgotten it is more online graffiti that leaks of it's site onto other sites. If Twitters graffiti stays on twitter it is mostly ignored it actually has to get off twitter to spread. Actively turning it into a circle jerk, will slow stuff leaking off twitter and kill it's market.

          Normal people will switch of public and go private to a large degree to avoid causing problems or being targets of problems, simply easier. So twitter c

  • Typing tweets is simply sending text messages to nobody, unless you are famous, of course. I rarely tweet, actually, but whenever I do, I never try to sound pompous or pretentious, to be perfect or ideal. My homework: Twitter vs Facebook research domyhomeworkonline.net [domyhomeworkonline.net]

The flow chart is a most thoroughly oversold piece of program documentation. -- Frederick Brooks, "The Mythical Man Month"

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