Twitter expands current offerings: Users can now post videos and host private group chats
Twitter is expanding from its current offering of 140 characters to allow users of the popular microblogging site to use group private messaging and native video.
Twitter has introduced a "mobile video camera" that enables users to take up to 30 seconds of video natively within Twitter and include in your tweet.
This will streamline the Twitter experience for users as it will become unnecessary to upload videos on other video platforms such as YouTube or Vine. The Twitter camera is designed to be simple to use so as to capture and share life's most interesting moments as they happen.
Twitter for iPhone users will be able to upload videos from the camera roll as well, a feature that will be available on Android app soon.
Twitter is also launching the group message feature, which allows users to communicate with several users within one group.
This functionality lets users send direct messages (DMs) to a group of up to 20 people. Users do not all need to follow one another to have this functionality.
In a post on Twitter's official blog, product director Jinen Kamdar explained the importance of direct messaging on the social network. Kamdar sees private conversations on Twitter as a perfect complement to the public tweets that can be read on the platform.
"Tweets have been more than 140 characters for some time," Kamdar wrote, explaining that this is due to the images, audio files and video files that users are now attaching to their tweets.
To enable the group chat feature, users need to create a group on Twitter. The group members are notified that they have been added to the group. As soon as the group has been created, you can send private direct messages to the group.
Twitter has more than 284 million monthly active users and is available in 35 languages.
