Twitter rolls out feature to ‘mute’ followers

Twitter announced a new feature for its mobile website and some apps on Monday, with which unwanted users can be silenced. The company behind the microblogging service expects this to improve user-friendliness.

Which left Twitter know on his blog. With the new feature, someone can silence an unwanted Twitter user, meaning that tweets and retweets from that user no longer appear on their timeline. In addition, push notifications by messages from that user will no longer come through, while the blocked person will not be informed that he has been silenced.

Twitter expects its users to have more control over what they see on their timeline with the mute function. This would improve the user experience, according to the American internet company. The feature is already packaged in the mobile site, and will soon appear in the iPhone and Android apps as well. Updates to those apps will appear in the coming weeks. It is not known whether other apps for, for example, Windows Phone will follow.

The mute function wouldn’t be the only way to give Twitter users more control over the social network. Twitter would like to make a feature to discuss public tweets privately with friends. This ‘whisper function’ with group conversations would presumably coexist with the current direct message option, it became clear at the beginning of this month.