With WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Line, Viber and others offering numerous dynamic messaging options, Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) knows that it needs to overhaul its messaging features and they took a very small step today. Just a day after the company announced that all tweets (ever) are now searchable, presumably sending millions into an hour of deletions, the company made it possible to share a public tweet privately with your followers. Redundancy aside, Twitter announced that this feature went live on Thursday writing in a blog post that “with today’s update you’ll be able to share a Tweet privately with any of your followers.”
All platforms
On both iOS and Android users can now long press their tweets and will receive the option to “Share via Direct Message,” with any of their followers. That way you can annoy your followers twice or perhaps make them laugh again(?). Following this selection, the user selected for this will receive a push notification and another reason to take their phone out of their purse or pocket assuming its not already in their hand or in front of them. On the desktop, users can hover over the tweet they wish to send and click the “more” option where they will then need to click the “Share via Direct Message” choice.
“Twitter is already a great place for public conversation; now it’s also easier to privately discuss things you care about,” a company blog post proclaims, referencing the new Tweet-to-DM feature.
Twitter’s messaging weaknesses
In theory, this allows users to turn a public conversation into a private one(?), I have a very hard time believing that many Twitter users requested this new feature or will take advantage of it, but I’ve been wrong many times in my life. It’s also very difficult to see Twitter users who use the other aforementioned messaging apps all of a sudden delete them given this new feature. There is a reason that Facebook even despite its own messaging app paid nearly $20 billion for WhatsApp and SnapChat turned down a massive offer from Google. Each are functional messaging platforms that offer quite a bit more than Twitter in the private (and group) messaging arena.
[drizzle]Twitter is surprisingly slow on the uptick and its stock price since the beginning of 2014 shows this. Twitter closed the day at $39.81 up $0.10 for a gain of 0.25%.
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