Twitter has launched two new features for its social network, namely group messaging and a new mobile video experience.
In a post on Twitter's official blog, product director Jinen Kamdar explained the importance of direct messaging on the social network. Kamdar sees private conversations on Twitter as a perfect complement to the public tweets that can be read on the platform.
Twitter is now launching the group message feature, which allows users to communicate with several users within one group.
Up to 20 users can be included in a group message, which users can initiate with any of their followers. The members included by a user in the group message are not required to be following one another.
Group messages can be created with the addition of a few taps from sending direct messages. Users that have been included in a group message will receive notifications.
The post also discusses the new mobile video experience being introduced to Twitter.
"Tweets have been more than 140 characters for some time," Kamdar wrote, explaining that this is due to the images, audio files and video files that users are now attaching to their tweets.
The new mobile video experience for Twitter further expands the capabilities of users to go beyond the 140-character limit, as the feature allows users to capture, edit and share videos straight from the Twitter app.
The design of Twitter's video camera is made simple to allow users to quickly set it up to capture moments that are most valuable and interesting to them, in videos that can be as long as 30 seconds.
Users will only need a few taps to include video to their conversations and tweets, allowing users to upload videos on instances such as their perspectives in live events without getting out of the Twitter app. Users can also preview the videos by tapping on their thumbnail before attaching them to the message or tweet.
Twitter will also have an inline editing feature that will allow users to drag and drop videos to rearrange them into one longer video. The videos that can be included, in addition to what was taken through the Twitter app, can come from the camera roll for iPhone users. This feature will also be coming to Android users soon.
The very first tweet sent out using the mobile video camera was from Oscars host Neil Patrick Harris, and the feature will now be accessible to all other users on Twitter.
