Periscope is rolling out new administrative controls for groups in what may be a bid to improve the user experience (and possibly safety). Starting today, closed groups and group invites will be available within the Twitter-owned livestreaming app that restricts who can participate in the respective communities.
Groups launched in November as a way for creators to target broadcasts to specific set of users, such as close friends, coworkers, or any other subset. By default, anyone could being livestreaming to the group or adding others to join — it was basically a “bring your own friend” affair.
Not everyone seemed to appreciate this liberal policy and therefore, Periscope has introduced two features to make creators comfortable with broadcasting. With closed groups, only the group’s creator is designated as an administrator, granting them authority over who can or cannot be a member. To toggle whether a group is open or closed, access the management screen and adjust the setting around “closed group”.
Above: Periscope now lets users manage the flurry of group invites they receive.
Additionally, there’s a group invite feature for users that’s launching which restricts others from being added to a group automatically. Within Periscope, users disable the “auto-accept group invites” setting in their profile and will no longer see notifications until they accept an invitation to join.
Twitter says that these features are in response to feedback garnered from the community with broadcasters wanting more control over who views their live videos. After all, maybe specific groups were created with a specific purpose so why take the chance of letting those that aren’t close friends being privy to the information? Closed groups also eliminates the “too many cooks in the kitchen” mentality and could keep troublemakers and those who would dilute the value of conversations out.
Providing a group invite control is also beneficial for users, which is similar to group direct messages which Twitter implemented in 2015. With that, many users likely felt themselves involuntarily added to random conversations, and now there’s a setting to prevent that from happening. Periscope’s group invite control is just like that, giving individuals the choice to control how many broadcast notices they’ll receive within groups.
These two features are rolling out on iOS and Android this week.
