Twitter tests Twitter Circle, a feature for sharing tweets with up to 150 people, rather than publicly, similar to Instagram's Close Friends sharing option
Twitter today announced that it is testing a new Twitter Circle feature, which is designed to allow people to share their tweets with a smaller crowd.
MacRumorsJuli Clover
Context & Ripple Effects
Twitter had already previewed posting to trusted groups in 2021, and code later pointed to Flock, a 150-person close-friends format. Circle turns that earlier direction into a named product test rather than a one-off concept.
Twitter users in the test can direct a tweet to a selected audience of up to 150 people instead of choosing between public posting and not posting.
Twitter adds an audience-selection layer to its core tweet composer, positioning Circle against Instagram's Close Friends-style sharing.
Second-order effects
Twitter's later rollout across its major clients makes Circle a consistent social-graph feature rather than a platform-specific experiment, raising the value of maintaining selected groups.
Twitter's separate CoTweets test extends the same product push beyond the standard single-author, public-tweet model, giving users more ways to control how posts are created and distributed.
Third-order effects
If Twitter continues pairing restricted audiences with alternative posting formats, the service's product model shifts from a single public timeline toward multiple sharing contexts within one account.
Selective-sharing features make the composition and management of social groups a durable competitive surface for Twitter and Instagram, rather than treating privacy as only an account-level setting.
The trend: Social platforms are adding audience-specific publishing controls to preserve intimate sharing alongside their public feeds.
Some Tweets are for everyone & others are just for people you've picked. We're now testing Twitter Circle, which lets you add up to 150 people who can see your Tweets when you want to share with a smaller crowd. Some of you can create your own Twitter Circle beginning today! http…
I... don't hate this? I'd like it to be more than 150, but I've had some burners over the years just to follow or stay in touch with groups of people. Twitter Lists remains basura. https://twitter.com/...
Hm that was one feature but yes I remember. The killer gesture that no one talked about was being able to see your social graph for every post, and track who helped you be heard. https://twitter.com/...
Trying Twitter Circles. Just got to decide how best to use the one circle you get. - Niche tech complaints - Niche local complaints about road markings on the A56 - Juicy gossip that would no doubt leak to other people and is best not tweeting at all - Other..? https://twitter.co…
Twitter staff suddenly have a huge incentive to iterate quickly on the product. Soon enough Elon Musk may be taking credit for every good idea that they have https://twitter.com/...
Twitter now allows you to create a circle of close friends and share a tweet that only they see. This feels like a nice balance between having to choose between a protected account and always public tweets. Curious to see if it evolves similar to close friends on Instagram. https…
Twitter's version of close friends is now live ... when I quote-tweeted this it offered to let me try it. Might work for you too! https://twitter.com/...