A week ago, Twitter
published a rundown of changes going to the service including improvements to Direct Messages and video abilities slated for one year from now, and today the informal community began revealing its new peculiarities as as promised. With the most recent rendition of Twitter for iphone, you can now share open Tweets secretly over Direct Messages with native embedding.
Twitter is moving towards making DMs (Direct Messages) more like the messaging apps that have captured the globe. But first, it wants to make sure you can share public tweets privately with your friends.
As it is written in the
Twitter blog
With today’s update you’ll be able to share a Tweet privately with any of your followers. To do this from either the iOS or Android mobile apps, long-press the Tweet in your timeline and choose “Share via Direct Message.” [...] The person you share a Tweet with will get a push notification, and the Tweet will display directly in the conversation.
Earlier this week Twitter updated its infrastructure so allow all users to send URLs via DMS.
Both of these updates are part of the company’s on-going strategy to not only give Direct Messages some love, but also make them a major player in the messaging wars.
While many Twitter users use DMs to chat with friends, followers and colleagues, it’s no where nearly as robust as other services out there including Facebook’s Messenger app, What’sApp (also part of Facebook) and Line. But the company is working change that.
Twitter says the new Tweet sharing feature through Direct Messages will be available for the official Twitter for iPhone app as well as Twitter.com, Twitter for Android, and TweetDeck for Chrome, Windows, and the web.
TweetDeck for Mac will pick up the ability to share Tweets over Direct Messages “soon” although today’s announcement makes no mention of support for the official Twitter for Mac app, Twitter for iPad app, or any third-party apps.
Twitter did say in its announcement last week that it aims to introduce native video features to its service sometime next year. In addition to pushing its Vine social network service, Twitter says it will add the ability to “record, edit and share” video natively from within its own app.
You can grab the latest version of Twitter for iPhone on the
App Store as the new version with Direct Message Tweet embedding is expected to become available soon.