Twitter Gives You a Way to Shut Up Your Talkative Friends

Twitter rolled out new feature Monday to let users better manage the deluge of tweets they receive.

Users can now “mute” people they follow, removing those people’s tweets and retweets from their own timelines. The muted person won’t know that he or she has been silenced. It’s a stealthy way to read less content from certain users without having to unfollow them. A person can easily be muted or unmuted at any time, Twitter said in a blog post.

“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,” the company said.

Though Twitter had been experimenting with the feature in recent weeks, it announced Monday that muting will be available to all users of the company’s iOS and Android apps, as well as the Twitter.com website. Some other Twitter applications, like TweetDeck, already allowed muting.

The feature is part of Twitter’s overall strategy to make its service more accessible to a wider range of people. Following a successful initial public offering, Twitter’s stock has tumbled in recent months as investors worry about the social network’s ability to attract new users. CEO Dick Costolo vowed that Twitter would make changes to its interface this year to make it easier to understand and manage. The company overhauled user profile pages in April as part of this effort.