Ever been annoyed by someone tweeting far too much and spamming up your timeline? If the screenshot below is anything to go by, users of Twitter’s website may not have to worry too much about that any more.
As you can see, this account, which is only following three people and is one of many belonging to The Next Web, has seen five posts from @TheNextWeb in a row – and Twitter’s collapsed them down to one, with the option to expand to view all.
If this is an old feature, it’s certainly not one that’s crossed our radar before. That said, once you follow more than a handful of people on Twitter, it’s unlikely to ever crop up as you’ll rarely see a row of tweets from the same user. We’re told that there’s no third-party script involved here – this is a genuine feature running on Twitter’s site.
New or not, it could well be a useful feature for newcomers who may be overwhelmed by tweets from noisy users, making it hard for them to see the value of their timeline. Hidden tweets are just a click away, so it’s not like this is a major hassle. Just don’t tell our own Brad McCarty, he took Facebook to task for a similar – albeit more ‘intelligent’ – feature just the other day.
We’ve approached Twitter for some background on this ‘hidden tweets’ feature.
UPDATE: Twitter has confirmed to us that the feature is live, saying that it’s a test that a small percentage of users may see. The company hasn’t said how long it’s been running, although a commenter on this post says it has been active on his/her account “off and on since maybe January.”
And for all the readers who see that “How To Survive Amsterdam” tweet and wonder what it is about: : http://t.co/FcMXhGR ;-)
Oh wow…this would come up in the feed on my blog…and I had no clue what it was…thought it was a glitch…been getting that from time to time now since maybe January. Wow! Thank goodness…at least now I know what it is…
@PawPurrry Interesting – thanks. How many people do you follow, out of interest?
seems more like a quick way to see previous tweets from an account that tweets a lot, rather than a way to hide tweets – know what i mean? cc: digitalmaverick
Little feature additions like these are great. For all those people that I follow who participate in Twitter chats, this could be of some use.
This is great, just what I need. Often only 1 or 2 tweets per person are relevant and it’ll reduce the noise on my feed.
This is NOT a great thing in all instances.
I use Twitter for disaster and restoration information through the account for @alabamapower (and previously did so for @redcross). We are seeing many people signing up for the service just to follow updates from these entities, and during times of disaster that will be noisy. What this “feature” will do is prevent some users from seeing the very thing they signed up for.
One size does NOT fit all, @Twitter.
I think this is terrible and epitomises just how much Twitter have ‘lost the plot’. If someone follows me (and by god I’m prolific and make no apologies for that whatsoever) then they take me *WART* *AND* *ALL*. If they don’t like how often I Tweet then the answer is easy: STOP FOLLOWING ME. It’s not rocket science.
Oh wow, no way dude, i never thought about it like that.
http://www.total-privacy.int.tc
This functionality would be great if it was at the user level as a “mute” button, rather than automatic. As others have stated, there are times when you want to see multiple tweets from an account, and times when you really want to shut someone up for a while, without unfollowing.
Yea! Please turn this on for everybody! I am so sick of people who tweet every minute.
좋아요, 아주 좋아요 ^^
읽는이의 선택도 존중해 주는 배려 ^^
I was going to tweet this, but, well, you know…
R
Reminds me of the way google buzz is handling this kind of ‘problem’. Liked it very much,
Doesn’t seem very smart to hide groups of random tweets without using any type of personalized filtering. Seems like the user should be able to say “I just want to hide [user]‘s tweets about [topic]“.
Like at Poundwire.