Twitter is testing its own version of Instagram’s Close Friends feature

A new feature coming to Twitter will let you have virtual conversations with up to 150 of your closest friends. It’s called “Flock,” and it’s currently in the developmental stage.

The first time we heard about this feature was last year when it was tentatively called “trusted friends.” At that stage, it was one of Twitter’s designers showing off concepts. It’s currently in active development, according to Alessandro Paluzzi, a developer, and reverse engineer.

Now it’s called Flock and still works the same way as those early designs. While diving around inside Twitter’s code, Paluzzi found pointers to a 150-person list limit. He also found that if you remove anyone from your Flock, they won’t be notified.

You will get notified if someone adds you to their Flock, however. This is similar to how Twitter Lists work now.

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That Flock list then works as a private section of Twitter. If you tweet to the Flock, only people on that list can see those tweets, and crucially, are the only people that can reply. It’s almost like a group direct message but carried out with normal tweets.

Oh, and if you like the idea but hate the Flock name? Twitter told The Verge that it’s only a placeholder, so it could be changed to almost anything before launch.

Have any thoughts on this? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

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Joe Rice-Jones

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