Twitter added two new services today to a) help people DM bomb lots of people at the same time and b) try to complement Vine with (slightly longer) in-app video support (read: ads).
Yes, Twitter now lets you capture, edit and share video directly from the Twitter app. Unsurprisingly, the video interface looks a lot like Vine, which Twitter acquired in 2012, except instead of seven-second clips, you can create videos as long as half a minute. The interface is primarily made up of thumbnails of clips in your camera roll. You can also choose to shoot a new video on the spot and upload to Twitter.
This move is probably motivated, in part, by other platforms like Facebook and Instagram steadily adding video support in their timeline, and also to (obviously) gives companies the opportunity to flood the internet with their carefully crafted 30-second ads. So adding video for Twitter is a win-win, for all us — maybe not so much. Thankfully, Twitter promises that videos won’t immediately begin playing in your feed, so you can choose whether or not to listen to one of your followers’ (or advertisers’) visual piece of genius.
And now here’s NPH giving us an idea of how all of this is all going to work:
Check out my Twitter video #Oscar exclusive! I gots me a scoop! pic.twitter.com/SGQ3oJHDqZ
— Neil Patrick Harris (@ActuallyNPH) January 27, 2015
That’s not the only new feature Twitter is ready to roll out. All users now have group DM superpowers and can include up to 20 people in a single message. It’s a feature that Twitter has sorely missed for some time and, as a result, has lost at least some users who migrated to other chat platforms like GroupMe, WhatsApp or really any other messaging service. You can included any of your followers to start the chat, but the participants don’t need to be followers with absolutely everyone because that would be a massive headache and unforgivably annoying.
These new updates will be rolling out to the Twitter’s Android and iOS apps over the next few days. Happy tweeting. [Twitter Blog]