Twitter is already a simple way to communicate with a lot of people at once because tons of people are on the service and you can easily include someone in a message with an @ mention. Sometimes you don’t want the world to see your discussion, though, and so Twitter has responded to that concern with a new feature.
Twitter is now rolling out group Direct Messages, which allow you to start private conversations with a group of people and share Tweets, photos, links, and emoji. You can start group DMs with any of your followers, and people can be added to the private chat even if they don’t follow other participants. When you’re added to a group DM, you’ll receive a notification.
In addition to group DMs, Twitter is now rolling out the ability to capture, edit, and share video directly from within the Twitter mobile app. Videos can be up to 30 seconds long. Twitter says that iOS users can also share videos that are already in their Camera Roll, adding that the feature will be rolled out to the Twitter for Android app “soon”.
Once you share a video, a thumbnail will be shown in your followers’ timelines, and they can play the clip with a single tap. Check out the Neil Patrick Harris tweet below for an example of Twitter’s video sharing.
Check out my Twitter video #Oscar exclusive! I gots me a scoop! pic.twitter.com/SGQ3oJHDqZ
— Neil Patrick Harris (@ActuallyNPH) January 27, 2015
It’s kind of strange to see Twitter rolling out video capture and sharing features considering that it owns Vine, a service dedicated to video sharing. Twitter’s videos are a bit longer than Vine’s, though, and this new feature means that Twitter users can easily share clips without having to install the Vine app.
