Twitter's answer to Instagram's Close Friends is now rolling out widely

Opening a Circle lets you post exclusive stuff for people you trust to read

Sometimes, we have thoughts that we want to put out somewhere, but don't want everyone reading. That's exactly the concept that drives Instagram's Close Friends feature, launched in 2018. If you want to upload a story, but you just want a small group of closer acquaintances to see it, it allows you to do exactly that — they're identical to normal stories, except highlighted in green. Twitter has been working on an almost-identical feature, but for your tweets, called Circle. Now, after an initial test, that feature seems to have started to roll out widely to users.

When logging into Twitter, whether entering from a browser or from your smartphone, some users have begun seeing a pop-up to tweet to your Circle. Entering the "Compose tweet" panel and tapping on the audience button above (which is set to "Everyone" by default but also lets you tweet to Communities if you're in any) will show you a new "Twitter Circle" option. You can add, and remove, people from your Circle by tapping the "Edit" button — people won't be notified if they're added or removed from someone's Circle. Likewise, if you see a tweet posted to someone's Circle, you'll also see a green notice telling you that only people in their circle can see that post.

Just like on Instagram, this lets you fine-tune the audience of certain posts so you can tweet more personal stuff to your closer mates to see without necessarily having the entire breadth of your Twitter followers seeing it. Some people keep separate, private accounts for that very purpose, where they only let friends follow them, but this would eliminate the need for doing that. Still, Close Friends hasn't precluded the phenomenon of the "finsta," or fake Instagram account, so we'll see how use behaviors change here.

Some folks are not seeing the feature in their accounts just yet, indicating that this might be a staged rollout. However, it should arrive for everyone soon. It's just a matter of time.