Late last year Twitter hinted at new features coming to the service soon. Now the first two of those have arrived: the ability to send private messages to groups of up to 20 people and the ability to shoot 30-second videos directly from the Twitter mobile app. Both features will become available to Twitter users in coming weeks.
The group-messaging feature uses Twitter’s existing Direct Message functionality, which to date has let users send private messages to other users who follow them. Users can create groups of up to 20 of their followers and those followers can also use the group to communicate with one another, even if not all of them are following one another.
Check out Twitter’s official video introducing group messages below:
While Twitter has allowed its users to share images and videos for years now, sharing videos from mobile devices has required using a separate app to record content before sharing it using Twitter’s mobile app.
“We designed our camera to be simple to use so you can capture and share life’s most interesting moments as they happen,” Twitter product director Jinen Kamdar explains. “In just a few taps you can add a video to unfolding conversations, share your perspective of a live event, and show your everyday moments instantly, without ever having to leave the app. Viewing and playing videos is just as simple: videos are previewed with a thumbnail and you can play them with just one tap.”
Videos can be up to 30 seconds long and iOS users can opt to attach existing videos from their camera rolls, too. This feature will come to the Android version of the mobile app shortly. We’ll have to wait and see how quickly third-party Twitter clients like Tweetbot add the new functionality to their apps, but as some improvements – like inline images – have actually come to third-party offerings before the official Twitter apps get them we suspect it’ll all happen rather quickly.