Twitter’s possible ‘trusted friends’ feature lets you send tweets to certain groups of accounts

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A designer that works at Twitter has been sharing ideas of possible new features to come to Twitter, on where else? Twitter. The three concepts are all around controlling who you share with and what can be shared back in your replies, and honestly, I’m absolutely here for it.

Before we go too far into the details, know that Twitter has said these projects aren’t in active development, just at the concept stages right now. Still, it’s cool to see things at this stage before new features are released to a chorus of “why the f*** did you do that.”

The two ideas over controlling where your tweets are seen are called “Trusted Friends” and “Facets.” Trusted Friends sounds a lot like Circles when Google+ was a thing, letting you set tweets to public or to certain groups of close friends, that you define.

“Facets” would take that control even further, letting users sort tweets into categories like Work or Personal, or even into hobbies or interests like sports. That way, the only people who see those tweets are those who will appreciate them.

The last idea is aimed directly at the Reply Guy as a friendly reminder to avoid certain phrases or ways of speaking. For instance, don’t want swearwords in your replies? Set the filter, and it’ll highlight any offending words as the reply is written, asking the sender to avoid that language. Sure, they can ignore the guidance, but you, as the original poster, can set those offensive replies to the bottom of the list, where nobody is ever going to bother scrolling to. Nice.

We can only hope that these kinds of controls over our own timelines eventually make it into Twitter’s tools for making the service safer for its users. For example, they’d work well with the “unmention” feature that’s currently in progress, giving users several options before having to use the block button.

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

Editors’ Recommendations:

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• Twitter is testing an “unmention” feature so you aren’t constantly pinged with notifications
• Twitter Blue, Twitter’s premium subscription service that lets you undo tweets is now live

Joe Rice-Jones

Maker, meme-r, and unabashed geek with nearly half a decade of blogging experience at KnowTechie, SlashGear and XDA Developers. If it runs on electricity (or even if it doesn't), Joe probably has one around his office somewhere, with particular focus in gadgetry and handheld gaming. Shoot him an email at joe@knowtechie.com.