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’s experimentation pipeline already ran through its twttr beta app and later brought threaded-conversation concepts to Twitter.com. The newly demonstrated controls extend that work from how replies are displayed to who can see a post and which identity presents it.
The features also anticipate the later social-privacy tool testing around older posts and follower lists, placing audience management and identity separation in the same product arc.
First-order effects
Twitter’s experimental feature set gives users potential controls to limit a tweet to trusted friends and to post under distinct personas, rather than treating every post as addressed to one undifferentiated audience.
Twitter’s product team must test whether these controls fit alongside its existing conversation-focused interface experiments, including threaded conversations tested on Twitter.com.
Second-order effects
More granular audiences and personas would change the context available to followers and participants in a conversation, making identity and audience selection a more explicit part of posting.
The privacy-oriented direction broadens Twitter’s testing agenda beyond reply design and presence signals toward controls over a user’s social graph and post visibility.
Third-order effects
If Twitter carries these experiments into products, the service shifts toward privacy as platform infrastructure: users manage separate social contexts within one account rather than relying on a single public identity.
That design direction makes audience controls, follower management, and historical-post controls parts of one broader trust-and-safety product layer rather than isolated settings.
The trend: Twitter is evolving from a primarily public conversation service toward configurable social contexts, with privacy and identity controls embedded in posting itself.
We hear y'all, toggling your Tweets from public to protected, juggling alt accounts. It could be simpler to talk to who you want, when you want. With Trusted Friends, you could Tweet to a group of your choosing. Perhaps you could also see trusted friends' Tweets first. https://tw…
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/...
i like this, as long as: 1) twitter makes it VERY EASY to tell when you're posting to trusted friends vs. public. 2) there is never any bleed between trusted friends and public. e.g. if a bunch of trusted friends like my tweet, that's not a signal to promote it to everyone. https…
This one: “new prompts that would ask people to reconsider the language they're using when posting a reply” could cut down Twitter traffic by half 😉https://techcrunch.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/...
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/...
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…
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/...
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/...
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/.…