Twitter Spotted Testing a Way to ‘Snooze’ Push Notifications

Twitter is testing a new feature that would allow users to mute push notifications for a certain amount of time. This discovery was first made by Jane Manchun Wong, who regularly discovers unreleased features on popular social media applications.

Wong found it by looking at the code underneath the social network’s Android app. She spotted a built-in bell-shaped snooze button at the top right corner of the notifications tab — tapping it brings up the Snooze Notifications panel that lets you mute push notifications for up to 12 hours.

The feature being tested by Twitter is labelled as “Snooze” and lets you silence notifications for either one, three or 12 hours. Once the Snooze feature is turned on, notifications would continue to accumulate in the “Notifications” tab of the Twitter app, thus allowing users to catch up anytime.

“Seeing the blue circle of push notifications popping up our Twitter app often sparks joy. For example, when your tweet went viral, your phone might keep buzzing nonstop. Sometimes, there might be a desire to pause the stream of push notifications on Twitter. Now Twitter has a ‘Snooze’ button that lets you pause push notifications for a specific amount of time,” Wong said in her blog post.

Twitter said on Tuesday that it may have used data for personalised ads without a user’s permission due to issues with the microblogging website’s settings. The company said it recently discovered those issues and fixed them on Monday, although it hasn’t yet determined who may have been impacted.

Consumer data is a powerful tool that companies use to decide where to place advertisements, what content to feature, and which consumers might be interested in the product. Big technology companies have been under scrutiny from regulators around the world over their data sharing practices.