Twitter is experimenting with new ways of increasing engagement on its platform which would permit you to choose the audience for specifics tweets, including limiting a tweet to trusted friends instead of your followers and tweeting from different personas from one account.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS:
- Twitter’s Trusted Friends concept would only send a tweet to your friends
- Another feature would help other people avoid profanity in their replies
- Facets would let you tweet from different personas from one account
Twitter’s Trusted Friends feature would let you pick tweet audience
Much like limiting an Instagram story to those in your Close Friends list, Twitter’s Trusted Friends idea would let you pick a tweet audience. After adding people to your Trusted Friends list, Twitter would let you touch the audience selector button in the compose window to choose between Everyone or Trusted Friends to limit who can see and reply to that tweet.
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! 🧵⬇️ pic.twitter.com/o1lmAQBlnt
— A Designer (@a_dsgnr) July 1, 2021
Twitter also considering a Facets feature
Another feature being considered, dubbed Facets, would let you publish tweets under different personas belonging to a single account. This would permit you to separate your personal and work-related tweets without having to use multiple Twitter accounts.
TechCrunch has more on that:
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.
This is an awesome idea, but it’s currently unclear how it would work in terms of highlighting content from multiple personas and their tweets on your timeline.
Reply Language Prompts and alternative timeline
And to help people get around the issue of offensive language in tweet comments, Twitter is reportedly experimenting with a new feature called Reply Language Prompts. In a nutshell, you’d create a list of offensive words that you would like to avoid in replies to your tweets.
Some replies hurt (and sometimes it’s accidental). So how might we help people set boundaries in the conversations they own?
Here's one way we’re thinking about — it's like spellcheck, but for not accidentally sounding like a jerk in the replies.
What do you think? 🧵⬇️ pic.twitter.com/I5cW2lXJyk
— A Designer (@a_dsgnr) July 1, 2021
Then, if someone uses a word on that list in their reply to your tweet, Twitter would put a warning highlighting the problematic word. Some of the ideas being considered would even explain to the poster why the tweet author does not wish to see said phrase in tweet replies.
Here’s how it’d work:
• Authors choose the phrases they prefer not to see
• These phrases are highlighted as ppl write replies; ppl can learn why, or ignore the guidance
• Authors can enable automatic actions, like moving violating replies to the bottom of the convo pic.twitter.com/VzxU6D7eMf— A Designer (@a_dsgnr) July 1, 2021
It’s unclear when—and if, for that matter—those ideas might be turned into actual features that Twitter could test before rolling them out to everyone. The fact that the company felt comfortable sharing prototype screenshots with the press could mean that some of the features may soon be tested with a subset of Twitter’s global user base.
It’s also entirely possible that Twitter will nix the features if the user feedback is negative.
The company is currently conducting several tests of unreleased features, including Super Follows and Ticketed Spaces, its new monetization options currently available in a limited test.