Twitter shows off features it is testing, including a way to tweet only to a group of trusted friends, ability to tweet under different “personas”, and more
Twitter has a history of sharing feature and design ideas it's considering at very early stages of development.
TechCrunchSarah Perez
Context & Ripple Effects
Twitter has used its twttr beta app to trial interface ideas and later moved threaded-conversation experiments toward Twitter.com. The newly shown concepts extend that experimentation from how replies are displayed to who can see a post and which identity publishes it.
Twitter’s product roadmap now includes controls that would let users separate trusted-group posts from broader public posting and publish through distinct personas.
Creators and ordinary users would gain more ways to compartmentalize conversations without leaving Twitter’s core posting flow, if the tests become products.
Second-order effects
More granular audience settings would make follower-list management and post visibility more central parts of Twitter’s privacy design, alongside the later tools for archiving and hiding older posts.
Twitter’s existing emphasis on conversation design—from the twttr prototype through threaded replies—would have to accommodate posts whose audiences and publishing identities are no longer uniform.
Third-order effects
If Twitter continues to turn public-posting experiments into user controls, the service shifts from a single public identity model toward configurable social contexts within one network.
The broader structural change is that trust and privacy controls become product infrastructure rather than a separate moderation question.
The trend: Social platforms are moving from one-size-fits-all public posting toward configurable audiences, identities, and privacy controls within the same service.
Ever want to Tweet, but not to everybody? We're exploring a bunch of ways to control who can see your Tweets. Here are two early ideas (we're not building these yet). I'd love your feedback! 🧵⬇️ https://twitter.com/...
This function can easily become a failure with one thing, and that thing is your mutuals being able to see: “This person limits who can view their tweets” message. https://twitter.com/...
I've desperately wanted something like this on twitter for a while. For all of Facebooks faults, the granularity that you can have of who to share a post to is really useful - and often negates the need for private accounts. https://twitter.com/...
Google+ or Path were way ahead of time. No bad ideas, just bad timing again. “Twitter considers new features for tweeting only to friends, under different personas and more” https://techcrunch.com/... https://twitter.com/...
my question is, instead, “ever want to tweet, but not then have to spend hours or days dealing with harassment that ends up having you featured as the main villain on a nationally syndicated TV show?” https://twitter.com/...
Twitter is exploring some interesting changes, including only sharing tweets with specific groups of people. There's also a potential setting that will move replies to the bottom of a conversation if they include certain keywords https://www.theverge.com/... https://twitter.com/.…
I like this idea; one of the things about the early days of twitter was feeling totally comfortable with new friends. With different circles from work/family/friends now here, it's hard to find a place to be “myself” on Twitter. Which is what brought me here in the first place! h…