Twitter launches Communities to compete with Facebook Groups

As an alternative to Facebook's popular Groups, Twitter has unveiled a new feature called "Communities," which allows users to exchange discussions on a specific topic.

Communities, which are now an invite-only feature, are created by Twitter users. Once joined in a Community, they will be able to tweet directly to other members and not just their followers. Only members of a Community will be able to like or reply to tweets created by other members.

Each Twitter Community will have its own moderators who will set the rules and invite or remove users. Twitter invited users to create the first Communities and will later allow anyone to apply to create their own.

“Communities are just invite-only for now, but we’re working on ways for people to discover and join Communities they want to be a part of,” the company said in a statement.

Twitter has been working on Communities since February and said that its goal was to make it “easier for people to form, discover, and participate in conversations that are more targeted to the relevant communities or geographies they’re interested in.”