FROM FACEBOOK’S BULLETIN TO TWITTER’S TRUSTED FRIENDS ...

If there’s one thing you can say about Facebook it’s that it’s not shy about copying a good idea.

This week it launched its Bulletin service – a platform for ‘creators’ to establish a moneymaking presence on its network.

Bulletin is essentially a member-powered newsletter service, much like Substack, which has been growing in popularity over the last 12 months. Substack allows users to create their own publication and charge people to receive it.

Bulletin does much the same thing, but is, of course, backed by the mighty distribution muscle of Facebook itself.

At launch only a handful of ‘creators’ are on Bulletin – the likes of writer Malcolm Gladwell and Wall Street expert Jane Wells are among them – but more will be added over time.

Eventually anyone will be able to start their own Bulletin and start making money for themselves.

Twitter has teased a few new features it is thinking about adding to its service in a bid to see what users think of them before they put the work in to implement them.

The first two – called Trusted Friends and Facets – are a bid to prevent the need for users to have two accounts, one for work and one for outside work.

Trusted Friends allows users to add followers to a special group, and then select whether any given tweet is visible to all users, or just that group.

The Facets feature would allow users to create kind of sub-accounts – other users could then follow just the tweets you post to one Facet or more, allowing you more granular control over who can see what. The last feature teased was the ability to specify words and phrases you don’t want to see in replies to your tweets.

Twitter emphasised it is not yet building these features, just asking for feedback… but with the company moving fast to evolve its service, they could make their way into the world sooner than we think.