Twitter Rolls Out Private Group Conversations, Native Video Tools

Screenshot: Twitter

Twitter is more than it was yesterday. And that’s true in more ways than one.

Today, the popular social networking service began offering two new tools: one for taking, editing, and sharing videos on your mobile phone (see left), and another for trading private messages among groups of people (see below, left). According to Twitter product director Jinen Kamdar, both tools will roll out to all users over the next several weeks.

Previously, Twitter let you upload videos using tools running outside its core social network, including the Vine short-form video service purchased by the company in 2012, and it let you trade private messages—aka “direct messages” or DMs—with individual people. But the new tools are still notable steps forward for the service, which must evolve into a more complete social network as its now public parent company competes with the rest of the net for both users and ad dollars.

With its new video tool, Kamdar says, Twitter aims to turn its service into even more of a visual medium. “There’s a lot of friction when you use another app [to upload video to Twitter],” he explains. “It’s much easier when things are baked into Twitter, the app you’re already using today.”

With just a few taps, the company says, you can add a video to any tweet. And once you send it, others can play it with but a single tap. Unlike vines, which are capped at six seconds, native Twitter videos can be as long as 30 seconds.

Screenshot: Twitter

The new tool is a reflection of the larger internet: more and more, video is becoming an integral part of some much of what we do online. And in similar fashion, the new group DM tool echoes a larger movement towards private group messaging (as opposed to the very public interactions that characterized so much of our social networking over the past decade). Most notably, Facebook recently introduced what it calls Facebook Rooms, which allows for private chats—and even pseudonymous messages—on the world’s largest social network.

Kamdar acknowledges that Twitter is part of this trend. But he also believes the service’s new DM tool is unique because it dovetails with Twitter’s unique breed of public messaging. “The people you interact with on Twitter—publicly and privately—tend to be people you don’t know in real life,” he says. “We think that the conversations you have with group DM could only happen on our app.”

With the new tool, you can start conversations with anyone who follows you on Twitter, and they don’t necessarily have to follow each other in order to participate. That may seem a small thing. But it’s welcome.