Tweetdeck users could already hide certain users from their timelines, but now Twitter is rolling out a “mute” function to its website and mobile apps, too.
That’s good news for the passive-aggressive among us, or for those worried about how colleagues, coworkers and family members would react to finding out they’ve been unfollowed altogether. Said product manager Paul Rosania in a blog post:
Muting a user on Twitter means their Tweets and Retweets will no longer be visible in your home timeline, and you will no longer receive push or SMS notifications from that user. The muted user will still be able to fave, reply to, and retweet your Tweets; you just won’t see any of that activity in your timeline. The muted user will not know that you’ve muted them, and of course you can unmute at any time.
In other words, now you can follow people without dealing with what used to be a downside of following them: y’know, actually having to see their tweets (more Facebookification!).
It’s a pretty cynical addition to Twitter if you think about it — fishing for new followers by following them first seems more practical than ever now that you can just immediately ignore them. It’s a collective action problem, in a way: Individual users will find it very useful to mute people, but the value of a follow becomes more diluted for everyone.
Scheduled tweets in Tweetdeck
Tweetdeck, meanwhile, has added a feature that used to be one of Hootsuite’s big advantages over the Twitter-owned client for power users: All users with access to a shared account will be able to view all scheduled tweets for that account.
This is particularly useful for newsrooms with Twitter accounts touched by multiple editors. No longer will editors using Tweetdeck have to worry about tweeting something already scheduled by someone else. And when breaking news happens, editors can delete tweets previously scheduled by staffers who have already left for the day.
