Twitter Working on Private Tweets Only to Trusted Friends

Twitter shared three early design concepts for new features it’s considering for its service. Trusted Friends would allow users to limit the audience for select tweets to a smaller circle of close friends. Users could categorize your tweets when you send them.

The service is also considering letting users list certain phrases that they’d rather not see in their replies. These ideas are in their early stages, and none are currently in active development.Many Twitter users already have multiple accounts to separate their work and personal lives, often with one of them being private to prevent sharing personal news too publicly. But features like Trusted Friends and Facets could allow for the same functionality from a single account.

Trusted Friends could offer a toggle to let you signify that a tweet should be public or only for friends, while Facets offers more granular control, theoretically letting you sort your tweets into not just professional and personal categories, but also specific hobbies or interests you might have. Twitter says that you might be able to follow someone just for their tweets on a certain topic, rather than having to follow their account as a whole.

They feature would let you specify certain phrases you’d rather not see in the replies to your tweets. Followers would then see these phrases highlighted, alongside a warning to not use this language. The company says that people could ignore the guidance, twet authors would have the option of moving these violating replies to the bottom of the conversation.

The company is also cautions that it isn’t currently actively building any of these features. Instead, the hope is that tweeting about them early could help the company gather feedback about its plans while they’re still in their early phases. Last month the privacy designer Dominic Camozzi tweeted a similar work in progress feature to let users unmention themselves when they’re tagged into a conversation.