Update (Aug 30, 12:45 pm ET): Twitter Circles leaves testing and rolls out for all platforms.
What you need to know
- Twitter Circle has been announced as a new feature for the social media platform.
- With this feature, you’ll be able to share tweets with a group of up to 150 people.
- Twitter Circle is still in testing, and is not currently available for all users.
Remember the good ole days of Google+ where you had the option to share your thoughts with everyone or just a select group? Well, it seems that Twitter is trying to recreate that magic with Twitter Circles. This feature comes as a bit of a surprise, as it was introduced by the @TwitterSafety account.
Some Tweets are for everyone & others are just for people you’ve picked.We’re now testing Twitter Circle, which lets you add up to 150 people who can see your Tweets when you want to share with a smaller crowd. Some of you can create your own Twitter Circle beginning today! pic.twitter.com/nLaTG8qctpMay 3, 2022
According to the introductory tweet, Twitter Circles will give you the option to share your tweets with a “smaller crowd.” You can add up to 150 people to your Twitter Circle, allowing only those who are included to see and respond to your tweets. And once you create a Circle, you aren’t “stuck” with those 150 people you originally picked, as Twitter will allow you to edit the circle to remove or add other Twitter users.
Unfortunately, it appears as though Twitter Circles has fallen under the company’s A/B testing, as it’s only showing up for select users. We’ve tried it on three different phones here and have not yet been able to activate or get the Twitter Circle prompt to appear when creating a new Tweet.
This feature addition comes following a rather tumultuous few weeks for Twitter as a company. Following Elon Musk’s purchase of almost 10% of the company, Twitter followed up by stating that Musk would be limited if he were to join the board. Then, we saw Musk backtrack and decide that he wouldn’t join the board, only to follow that up with getting approval and financial backing to purchase the social media giant for a whopping $44 billion.
And while there’s nothing wrong with new features coming to the platform, we’re still awaiting the arrival of the long-overdue edit button. Twitter states that this feature has been in the works for more than a year and will arrive “in the coming months.”
With Google+ long gone (RIP), Twitter Circles could be the reincarnation of one of the social media platform’s best features. Now, we just have to wait for it to be made available for more users.
Update
On Tuesday, Twitter announced that after a few months of testing, Twitter Circles is now available for all users on Android, iOS, and the web.
Users can now opt to post tweets only to people they’ve selected for their Circles. Circled can be edited from an option in the tweet draft box or from the “Twitter Circles” option in the navigation pane.
Twitter notes how the feature is helpful in that it eliminates the need for a separate profile for users that want to post certain content for select people, thus giving users a safe space that consists only of the users they choose.
Circles is available globally as of August 30.
