Speaking at the Consumers Electronics Show (CES), Twitter product management director, Suzanne Xie, shared a few changes that will soon be coming to the platform.
Xie announced that Twitter will soon be getting a feature called “conversation participants” on the compose box for tweets, which will allow users to decide before they post a tweet if and who they want to allow to reply to the post. Xie says there will be four options to choose from: “Global, Group, Panel, and Statement.”
The Global option opens the tweet to be replied to by anyone, Group option is for people you follow and mention, Panel is for people you specifically mention in the tweet, and Statement simply allows you to post a tweet and receive no replies.
— Dieter Bohn (@backlon) January 8, 2020
She also said that Twitter is “in the process of doing research on the feature” and that “the mock-ups are going to be part of an experiment we’re going to run” in Q1 2020. Twitter says it will take feedback from that experiment before the feature is finally launched globally later this year.
Update:https://t.co/JjldnqIsxO pic.twitter.com/sANCJt7hwQ
— Dieter Bohn (@backlon) January 8, 2020
Xie announced another feature that is coming to Twitter, which is aimed at specific conversation view, including threading. The idea behind the feature is to put all of a conversation “on one screen.” The screen has lines meant to easily lead you through replies and also call out specific authors.
Twitter product manager, Rob Bishop, was also at the event who said that soon, when users see a tweet about a certain topic from somebody they follow, Twitter may surface a button to prompt them to follow that specific topic under the tweet, according to a report by The Verge.
Users will soon also be able to customise the display of lists, and Twitter will also start making screens that make it easier to find lists.