When was the last time you got a direct message on Twitter? Be honest, it was most likely one of those automated “Thanks for following!” things from a verified social media “expert” account. From the looks of it, however, Twitter is hard at work making DMs less annoying and more useful for you.
In a recent interview with The Next Web, Twitter vice president of Asia Pacific and Latin America Shailesh Rao let slip that the company is interested in experimenting with the way they connect users to one another by making direct messages more prevalent and easier to use. We’re guessing that’s code for “we’re tired of seeing couples tweet schmoopy things at each other instead of just texting,” but maybe that’s just us. Also, those people are probably not going to stop doing that.
“We’re going to be good at certain things but we want to provide a better balance. In terms of public, [Twitter is] great, but sometimes you want to whisper to somebody, and enabling that as well gives a much broader communications experience on our platform.” Dickson Seow, the head of Twitter’s Asia-Pacific communications and public relations, also said.
Over the past year Twitter has been messing around with their format at a much higher rate than usual. Most recently they added tagging and multiple image uploading, and changed around their individual user profiles to look more like those of Facebook of Google+ –much to everyone’s chagrin, of course. If they’re now looking to expand their DM service, it’s entirely likely that they’re doing it solely to capitalize on the popularity of gchat and Facebook Messenger, too. C’mon, Twitter, we love you because you’re different than those other social media outlets!
Still, it wouldn’t hurt to have a better private messaging service, we suppose. We just hope they’re doing it because they think we want it, and not because they want to be just like Facebook. In the meantime, we’re going to keep having all our conversations very loudly and in public. That’s never worked out badly for anyone, right?
(via The Next Web)
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