Twitter has launched a new feature enabling you to limit who can reply to your tweets. The feature was talked about during the company's event we attended at CES where Twitter said it wanted to prioritise "conversational health".

So if you want to make an announcement that might attract unsavoury responses you can ban replies or limit them to people you follow. You can also limit replies to people you follow or people who are mentioned in the tweet. 

So you can effectively have a group chat – perhaps discussing a professional topic you want others to see but not attract so-called reply guys or people who want to explain why you've obviously got it wrong. 

Twitter is opening the feature up to a limited group of people globally, but everyone can see how these conversations will work. If you can't reply to a tweet, the reply icon will be greyed out so that it’s clear for people they aren't able to reply - just as the retweet button is currently for a tweet from a locked account.

There's also a new layout for replies so it should be easier to read all conversations around a Tweet and check retweets with comments

Twitter has shown it's happy to experiment with more features in recent times as it seeks to increase engagement and encourage 'lurkers' to feel more comfortable in starting conversations rather than feel by putting something our there they are simply exposing themselves to potential attack. 

It's also been testing a Snapchat-style disappearing tweet feature which it has dubbed 'fleets'.