While giving a presentation at CES this week, Twitter’s director of product management Suzanne Xie showed an image of a new process that’s still in development, that’ll allow Twitter users to define the audience for each of their tweets, direct from the composer window.

From the screenshot above you can deduce, the new option will provide the users with four different sets of audience settings. These settings include Global, Group, Panel, Statement. Details of each setting are as follow:
- Global – Anyone can reply to the tweet
- Group – Only people you follow or mention would be able to reply
- Panel – Only people you directly mention within the tweet text itself would be able to reply
- Statement – No tweet replies would be allowed
This new process has a lot of potential for the users when it comes to controlling for the users on the platform. If it is defined who is allowed to reply, it would become easy for people to have live conversations.
“It’s actually quite difficult to have a fireside chat when you have a billion people screaming into your ear. Like, imagine we had tens of thousands of people in the studio with us right now, talking into our ear while we were talking to each other.“
With this update, If you set the people who were allowed to reply to the post, Twitter will provide the chat interface in the form of interview-style discussions, which would be great for managing live chats or interviews with the celebrities, which most of the time are flooded if you were to limit the respondents to only those who were tagged in the discussion, Twitter would be able to facilitate interview-style discussions, which could be great for hosting live chats, or even major celebrity interviews, which are often flooded with spam on dedicated hashtags.