Twitter 'follows' Facebook by hiding Tweets

April 20, 2011 11:34 PM
Tom Cheredar

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While microblogging site Twitter is quick when it comes to breaking news, the opposite is true for its ability to implement new features.

The company is testing a new feature that would hide excessive messages from users who send lots of messages in a short amount of time — an ability that has been standard in Facebook for ages.

The “hide” feature is live for a small percentage of Twitter users and may have been active for months before turning up on anyone’s radar, reports The Next Web. The company did not indicate a time-table for full roll out, but the sooner it does happen, the better.

As many long-time Twitter users may have experienced, a handful of over-active accounts can create enough noise to render your main feed useless. The two current options for eliminating that noise are to unfollow certain people, or create a separate “Twitter list” of users who update less frequently — both of which offer a broken experience for handling information overload.

It makes a lot of sense that Twitter would want to address the problem of an increasingly noisy main feed. And now that we know the hiding feature is a reality, it probably won’t be long until the company copies another page from Facebook by giving users the ability to block applications that work in conjunction with Twitter.

Yes, Twitter is indeed following Facebook.

Not long ago, it was the other way around — with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg drastically changing the way his company’s platform operated in an effort to stay relevant and competitive with Twitter, which sounded ludicrous at the time since both Twitter’s user base and valuation were deemed much lower by comparison.

If Twitter wants to remain relevant in the future, it will need to do more than update its welcome screen and keep pace with Facebook.

http://twitter.com/iLikeGirlsDaily Lisa

I agree: “If Twitter wants to remain relevant in the future, it will need to do more than update its welcome screen and keep pace with Facebook.”
http://twitter.com/GK_soulmate ishi

“If Twitter wants to remain relevant in the future, it will need to do more than update its welcome screen and keep pace with Facebook.”I completely disagree. Comparing Facebook and Twitter is like comparing, if you'll forgive my antiquated analogy, apples and oranges. Yes, they're both fruit, but that's pretty much where the similarities end. Both of these social networking sites have completely different functions and, to some degree, different demographics.For the most part, I believe Twitter's lack of updates has been b/c it simply hasn't needed them. People are happy with how Twitter was set up; they're isn't a need for constant updates like Facebook (though I would estimate about 70% of their updates are hated by Facebook users) b/c it is infinitely more simple. There are no games, no applications, quizzes, & etc. There is simply a text box with a 140 limit where you can write as much as you can w/o going over.I guess, to sum up, you could say Twitter is to Google as Facebook is to Yahoo! Sometimes simple is much better, and I think Twitter is going at their own speed just fine; they're not worried about playing the “Keeping up with Jones'” game b/c, in my opinion, they simply don't have to.
http://twitter.com/cockyjeremy Jeremy Lester

This is where companies screw up. Thinking they need to add more and more features. Sometimes things need to be left alone. Twitter is fine. Leave it alone.
http://francojtorres.tumblr.com Franco J. Torres

That would be great. It would allow me to follow people that I don't follow now because they tweet too much.
http://twitter.com/criddar Cody Riddar

If Twitter hasn't needed features, then why has the community provided them? Hashtags, Retweets… both are “features” or hacks started by users to make sense of the platform. And now Twitter is saying “hey, we're a news platform”, but they won't add any features to let the users filter. Why is that? Instead they just throw out blanket hiding of users. Filtering should be my job, as the curator of my own feed.
http://webweekly.tv/2011/good-friday/ 34: Good Friday

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