14 DAY TRIAL // It’s only been two weeks since Twitter was testing out a mute button for all those sometimes annoying users you follow. Now, the feature if officially being rolled out to all users.
“Today we’re beginning to introduce a new account feature called mute to people who use our iPhone and Android apps and twitter.com. Mute gives you even more control over the content you see on Twitter by letting you remove a user’s content from key parts of your Twitter experience,” starts off the announcement signed by Paul Rosania, Twitter product manager.
The company notes that muting users you’d like to hear less from is just an extension to the control that the service is giving users, including the way it’s possible to turn on device notifications for favorite users.
Muting a user on Twitter will make their tweets and retweets invisible to your home timeline. If any push or SMS notifications have been previously set, they will be disabled for as long as you choose to keep the mute activated.
These users will still be able to favorite your messages, as well as to reply to them or retweet them, but that won’t appear in your timeline at all. “The muted user will not know that you’ve muted them, and of course you can unmute at any time,” he wrote.
All you have to do to enable this new feature is go to the account of the person you want to mute, click on the gear button in the ribbon underneath their profile and pick “Mute” from the list. The feature should be available right next to the “Block or Report” option.
The feature is still being rolled out, so it may take a little bit to get to you, but it will certainly arrive in the next couple of days, since Twitter is known for its quick work in such situations. Updates for the Android and iOS apps have already been deployed, so make sure to update those too if you use the Twitter tool on your smartphone.
Twitter is constantly playing around with new features, but this one has to be one of the most useful ones we’ve seen in months, especially after all the design modifications brought to the user interface.
The possibility to mute users isn’t exactly new for old Twitter users who use various apps. Even TweetDeck, a tool that Twitter bought a while back, offers this possibility.