With the mute button, Twitter wants you to control the noise on your timeline

Your Twitter timeline is likely a crowded place. Even if, you’re following a hundred people, you will to find well over a hundred tweets within minutes, all sitting on top. What’s on the bottom disappears never to be found again, unless you go looking.   And if Twitter is where you look for news, and are following more than 10 news media accounts, you are likely to be bombarded with tweets till you can’t see anyone else on your timeline, especially in these post-election days. Now Twitter is trying to change all of that.   On Monday Twitter, announced that it was introducing a mute button, one will allow users to mute all those over-tweeters. The company wrote, “Today we’re beginning to introduce a new account feature called mute to people who use our iPhone and Android apps and twitter.com. Mute gives you even more control over the content you see on Twitter by letting you remove a user’s content from key parts of your Twitter experience.”   One you mute a user, their tweets and retweets will no longer be visible on your timeline, and you won’t get push or SMS notifications from them. However, the muted user will still be able to favourite, reply to, and retweet your tweets, though you won’t see any of that activity on your timeline.   As this piece on The Next Web, points out this is an attempt to correct the outcry that followed post the introduction of new changes to the blocking policy.  Initially when  Twitter had introduced the new policy on blocking users,  it allowed “blocked users to follow and see your tweets.” However, Twitter changed this within hours thanks to popular outcry. The mute button is an improvement on that policy, argues the piece.   Mute button is uncannily similar to what Facebook offers with Unfollow on the News Feed and this is definitely a worthy move. On Facebook at times you might have friends who insist on sharing an ‘inspiring’ quote every morning or are just naive enough to fall for spam links all the time. You might not want to unfriend them, but you don’t care for their posts anymore. ‘Unfollow posts from this user’, is thus a great option on Facebook.   The mute button if seen in this context is particularly useful. You might be following someone who’s usually interesting enough on Twitter, but you don’t care about that flurry of tweets coming your way from some live event they are attending, or when they are really trying to push that unfunny hashtag. In such a case, it’s best to mute them, till that storm is over.   Blocking or unfollowing people always seems like an extreme option, on a social networking site such as Twitter where a lot of the engagement is with random strangers and not necessarily with friends. While blocking abusive trolls is definitely important, you might feel less inclined to do so for an account or user, whom you have followed for a while or, simply because they are over-tweeting at the time.   Mute is also useful to avoid Twitter followers who are engaged in a long Twitter flame war with someone else and feel the need to re-tweet every single bit of that conversation to all their followers. Not every Twitter war will interest followers and the mute button is good to block out this noise. It should be noted that Twitter clients such as Tweetdeck do offer the mute option already, so it’s not something entirely new.   But the question really is whether mute on Twitter will it end the tweet noise on timelines? Not everyone is convinced. As TNW’s Josh Ong argues, “There’s a strong likelihood that I’ll forget to unmute folks and just end up never interacting with them again. The ability to preemptively mute specific words and hashtags and set time limits would give me more of a reason to use it.”   However even with its limitations, mute should give users some more control  over what they see on their timeline and that’s much needed on Twitter.