Twitter is delivering on promises made to industry analysts regarding new services and the first is apparently tweet-sharing between two users and groups of users via its messaging service.
Back at the company's first ever analyst day, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said the organization believes private messaging is important to the social network's long-term growth and that it needed a more viral nature.
The ability to share tweets privately is poised to encourage more Twitter users to rely on the social networking site's private-messaging system, which already suffers from character constraints that rival platforms haven't placed on themselves.
"Twitter is already a great place for public conversation; now it's also easier to privately discuss things you care about," says Twitter.
Users of the Android or iOS version of the Twitter app can select the "Share via Direct Message" option from the "More" icon on a tweet. The person chosen as the recipient will receive a push notification, inviting him or her to view the embedded content in a private message.
The Chrome and Windows versions of TweetDeck support the tweet-sharing feature as well. A Mac version of the feature is still in the works.
Encouraging use of its private messaging platform is just a slice of Twitter's ambitious plans to spur its growth. Kevin Weil, Twitter's vice president of product, expounded on Costolo's remarks about the company's aspirations to roll out a more robust video experience.
"[Aside] from just watching video more easily on Twitter, you should be able to record, edit and share your own videos natively on Twitter, too. Alongside short-looping Vine videos, we think you'll have fun sharing what's happening in your world through native video." That addition is expected in the first half of 2015.
Along with improving private messaging, for which more updates are planned, Twitter is also attempting to engage the approximately 500 million logged-out users monthly, people who see embedded tweets around the Web. To do that, the company wants to put more relevant content before people's eyes.
"[We're] exploring ways to surface relevant Tweets so the content that is interesting to you is easy to discover -- whether you stay on Twitter all day or visit for a few minutes -- while still preserving the real-time nature of the platform that makes Twitter special," said Weil.
