Twitter pre-announced a feature called Trusted Friends last year that would allow people to send tweets to a specific group of people. Now that feature has a new name, but we still don’t know when we will be able to use it.
Twitter is now calling Trusted Friends something new — Flock, according to code found in the current app by Alessandro Paluzzi and reported by Input. The name change makes sense, with the code spelunking also outing a new 150-person limit on the number of people that can be part of a flock. Why Twitter didn’t go with 140 people, I’ll never know.
It’s also important to note that people will not be told when they have been removed from a flock, according to the report. They will get one when they have been added to a flock however, so keep that in mind.
The whole feature feels similar to one that Instagram offers that allows close friends to see content but not the rest of their followers. We can expect Flock to work in much the same way.
Unfortunately, there is no timeline for when any of this will be made available and you will of course have to use the official Twitter app if you want to take advantage of Flock and similar features. The Twitter app isn’t the best iPhone app for actually using Twitter in many people’s eyes, but it’s the only way to get Twitter’s exclusive features and that seems unlikely to change any time soon.
