The microblogging platform is currently testing a Mute button that is supposed to make the whole experience a lot more pleasant, by turning off unwanted tweets and retweets.
Back in September, in a blog post that was righteously named Experiments @Twitter the company took pride in the fact that not a day passes without a new experiment. With the implementation of this Mute button, it’s as if the Twitter’s employees read my post about the Fave People tab, where I explained how great of a job Flipboard does by allowing its users to mute Twitter accounts in order to filter information and make it more relevant to their needs.
Alex Roetter, VP of Engineering at Twitter, explained in that blog post that “We also experiment with features that may never be released to everyone who uses Twitter. Those experiments are perhaps even more valuable because they help us decide what not to do — which is important as we work to keep Twitter simple while improving the user experience. Ultimately, our goal is to learn and keep making the product better; we aren’t necessarily looking to launch all of the experiments we roll out.”
The Mute button is a discreet solution for secretly quieting down someone without unfollowing them, which would be an alarm-triggering measure. Some similarities between the newly-tested feature and Facebook’s “Unfollow” may be noticed, but these two social networking platforms have been copying each other’s features for years, so that shouldn’t surprise anyone.
Twitter has yet to officially announce the new feature. For the time being, only some iOS and Android users have the Mute button in their mobile Twitter app, but if the company decided to make this available to all of its customers, the decision would undoubtedly be appreciated.
One possible scenario that makes this feature handy is when following back people that are interested in what you are tweeting. The feelings don’t always reciprocate, but it’s only polite to follow back someone who started following you. Still, that doesn’t mean that each and every tweet of theirs should make it to your newsfeed.
Future features should make Twitter an even more likeable platform, even though such features might be inspired by Facebook or Google+.
Be social! Follow Walyou on Facebook and Twitter, and read more related stories about Twitter’s Fave People timeline that enables us to follow only the tweets of our favorite people and Twitter mobile app’s photo tagging and sharing.
