Twitter ‘follows’ Facebook by hiding Tweets

While microblogging site Twitter is quick when it comes to breaking news, the opposite is true for its ability to implement new features.

The company is testing a new feature that would hide excessive messages from users who send lots of messages in a short amount of time — an ability that has been standard in Facebook for ages.

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The “hide” feature is live for a small percentage of Twitter users and may have been active for months before turning up on anyone’s radar, reports The Next Web. The company did not indicate a time-table for full roll out, but the sooner it does happen, the better.

As many long-time Twitter users may have experienced, a handful of over-active accounts can create enough noise to render your main feed useless. The two current options for eliminating that noise are to unfollow certain people, or create a separate “Twitter list” of users who update less frequently — both of which offer a broken experience for handling information overload.

It makes a lot of sense that Twitter would want to address the problem of an increasingly noisy main feed. And now that we know the hiding feature is a reality, it probably won’t be long until the company copies another page from Facebook by giving users the ability to block applications that work in conjunction with Twitter.

Yes, Twitter is indeed following Facebook.

Not long ago, it was the other way around — with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg drastically changing the way his company’s platform operated in an effort to stay relevant and competitive with Twitter, which sounded ludicrous at the time since both Twitter’s user base and valuation were deemed much lower by comparison.

If Twitter wants to remain relevant in the future, it will need to do more than update its welcome screen and keep pace with Facebook.