Twitter
on Tuesday began rolling out new group chat and video features as it
worked to ramp up use of the one-to-many messaging service. “Private
conversations on Twitter are a great complement to the largely public
experience on the platform,” product director Jinen Kamdar, whose handle
is @jinen, said in an online post.
“The
group function lets you start conversations with any of your followers
and they don’t all need to follow one another in order to chat.” Twitter
allows users to send direct messages to one another; the new feature
expands that capability to allow shared exchanges involving as many as
20 people, according to Kamdar.
The
Twitter application for smartphones has also been modified to allow
people to easily capture, edit and share videos. The new feature allows
for sharing of videos 30-seconds or less in length.
“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,” Kamdar said.
Twitter’s
application for iPhones will also let people upload video from camera
rolls on devices, and that capability is to be available soon on
Android-powered smartphones.
The new features will roll out to all Twitter users in coming weeks.
Twitter
last week updated its feeds to give users a recap of tweets missed
while not connected to the messaging platform. The service last week
also announced a partnership with Microsoft Bing to translate tweets in
some 40 “language pairs.”
The
enhancements come with Twitter seeking to boost engagement with users
amid growth which has been slower than some analysts expected. In
October, Twitter said the number of monthly users grew 23 percent from a
year earlier to 284 million.
A
Pew Research Center report showed that among US users, Twitter is
behind Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Instagram in the number of
users. The San Francisco-based firm has seen its stock buffeted by worry
that it isn’t growing robustly enough in terms of numbers of users and
the amount of time spent at the service.
Posted by : Gizmeon
No comments:
Post a Comment