Twitter Flock Could Be the Final Version of ‘Trusted Friends’ Concept, to Let Users Limit Tweets’ Visibility

Twitter Flock could be the final version of the ‘Trusted Friends' feature that the microblogging network announced as a concept in July last year. It appears to allow users to have up to 150 people in a group who all will be able to see their tweets and respond to them privately. A teardown of a recent Twitter for Android beta app has also included the code to suggest the Flock feature. Twitter may aim to offer an experience similar to Instagram's ‘Close Friends' by offering Flock on its platform. The Instagram feature allows users to share their Stories to a certain group of people instead of making them public.

Reverse engineer Alessandro Paluzzi on Friday posted a screenshot that suggests how Twitter Flock would work. It shows that users will be able to add up to 150 people to their Flock where they can share their content privately. Users in the Flock will only be able to view the tweets shared within it and reply to them from their accounts.

The screenshot shared by Paluzzi also shows that users will be able to remove any of the people in their Flock. Accounts removed from the Flock will not be notified about the removal.

The engineer initially found the implementation of Twitter Flock as a rebranded version of Trusted Friends in December. Earlier this month, Paluzzi also shared a screenshot where the feature was seen to be in testing on the timeline.

XDA Developers separately reported that the teardown of Twitter for Android beta version 9.27.0.2 included the strings referring to the Flock feature. The code suggested that the feature would be aimed to let users limit the visibility of certain tweets to small groups.

Users who would be added to the Flock would see a message on their timeline each time when a tweet sent in their group appeared. The strings also indicate the rebranding of the original Trusted Friends feature that was announced last year.

Gadgets 360 reached out to Twitter for a comment on the development, and a company spokesperson responded by saying it is “currently exploring ways” to enable users to tweet in small groups.

“Twitter is always working on new ways to help people engage in healthy conversations, and we're currently exploring ways to let people Tweet to smaller groups. We previewed this concept last year as public feedback helps shape what we build. We don't have any further details to share but more to come soon,” the spokesperson said in a prepared statement sent over an email.