The long-rumored and highly anticipated Twitter mute button has begun rolling out for end users, and it allows them to eliminate a user from their Twitter feed without blocking the user entirely.
Muting a user makes it so that user’s actions won’t appear in your twitter feed, but significantly, the user won’t be notified of the mute. It also won’t prevent the muted user from favoriting, retweeting or replying to your tweets, but those actions won’t show up in your twitter feed. For those that enjoy using push and/or SMS notifications on their mobile devices, the muted user will no longer cause those notifications to go off.
In addition to helping you deal with annoying users in a less severe way, the function could also be used to consolidate and limit twitter feeds for users who follow a lot of people. Following back is considered a polite move in some Twitter circles, and as wrong as that perception may be, it has caused some users to have an unmanageable number of accounts that they follow. Allowing accounts to mute users lets accounts that follow a lot of users trim back their twitter feeds and focus on the people they actually want to follow, without offending people by unfollowing or blocking them.
It is a feature many Twitter clients have used for a while, but it is a welcome to see it become available on the default Twitter client. If you have someone you want to mute, simply click the “more” link on any of the user’s tweets and select “Mute @username.”
As is typical in big updates like this, Twitter plans to roll out the feature over the coming weeks, so if you don’t see the mute feature, give it some time.
[Photo Credit: adactio]
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