Robert de Niro introduced Ben Stiller and all of us to a concept called the Circle of Trust in the 2000 film Meet the Parents. Now, over 20 years later, Twitter is taking that lesson to heart and spinning it into a new feature it’s testing called Twitter Circle.
The Twitter Safety team on Tuesday introduced the feature, which is designed to allow users to share their tweets with up to 150 people instead of sharing them with a public audience. Some people are able to use Twitter Circle already, but it’s currently unknown when it will be rolled out to everybody. The testing phase is not exclusive to either iOS or Android, nor is it exclusive to Twitter Blue subscribers.
https://twitter.com/TwitterSafety/status/1521540727557218309
If you don’t have Twitter Circle right now but your friend does (if they’re lucky), you’ll be able to see the green label that reads “only people in [insert username here]’s Twitter Circle can see this Tweet” on any of their recent tweets if you happen to be a part of it. Once you do get the feature, Twitter will recommend you to add mutual friends you communicate with often, as well as people who don’t already follow you in the first place, but the latter group won’t be able to see the tweets you labeled as “Twitter Circle.”
Twitter Circle bears a striking resemblance to Instagram’s Close Friends feature, where users can select a certain number of people who can see their stories. What makes the resemblance more striking is the green color scheme, only there’s no green ring circling the profile picture like on Instagram.
Twitter users are already able to limit their tweets to people they follow or people they mention. Twitter Circle makes it so that mutual friends don’t get left out of the conversation.