Twitter is a great tool for keeping in touch with friends and family, and even follow up with the latest happenings from around the world. However sometimes you just might want to stop a user’s tweets from appearing in your timeline. You might not want to unfollow them, simply just make them disappear from your timeline for a few hours. Third party applications already allow users to do that and it looks like Twitter’s official mobile applications might soon get the mute feature as well.
Several users have already received the option to mute people on Twitter in both iOS and Android Twitter apps. Once a user is muted their tweets are not displayed in the timeline unit they’re unmuted. No need to unfollow, but no need to read every single detail about an event that someone you need to follow is live-tweeting.
Popular third-party Twitter clients like Tweetdeck and Tweetbot have offered this feature for quite some time now. The former was even acquired by Twitter in 2011 but the feature didn’t make its way to the official application. Twitter hasn’t made an official announcement yet regarding the mute feature so its possible that it may only be dipping its toe in the water for now.
Certainly the feature will be much appreciated by the 200-million plus Twitter users once it goes live for all. Though who knows when that might happen.