latest
Twitter for Android finally gets a search feature that should've arrived much sooner
It’s been live on the iOS app for two years
While direct messages are great for private conversations on Twitter, it gets increasingly challenging to locate that one thread you're looking for in the long list you’ve built up over the years. To make the process smoother, Twitter is finally adding a search bar in the DM section of its Android app — about two years after the iOS app got one.
Instagram's foray into messaging is slowly expanding. What began as a simple messaging section for users to communicate without leaving the image-sharing app is now a quasi full-fledged messenger with support for GIFs, tight integration with Stories, video calling, disappearing media, and more. The latest addition that began rolling out yesterday is voice messages.
Earlier today, Twitter sent a message to a large number of users informing them about an API bug. According to the company, it identified a bug on September 10 that potentially allowed direct messages and protected accounts to be read by "Twitter developers who were not authorized to receive them."
Earlier this year, Instagram added the ability to embed GIF stickers in Stories (and then removed the feature, and then put it back). Now users can send GIFs to each other in DMs, via a new button in the composer bar.
Twitter is a fun place, isn't it? It's a friendly area of the internet where you can go to engage in meaningful, mutually respectful conversations. Oh wait, I meant the exact opposite. In any case, it's trying to improve and one of its latest methods is to filter out "lower quality" direct messages from your inbox. The social media giant announced its new feature this afternoon, to mixed response.
Google is the king of server-side tests, but it's by no means the only company that does them. Instagram also uses them fairly often, and this time around, it's trying something that may make some people a bit annoyed. It's experimenting with swapping the profile and DM icons, as well as putting a row of emoji in the comments section for quick access.
What's the point of broadcasting live on Instagram if you can't prod your followers to watch you? Otherwise you're just livestreaming to the wind. To solve this crisis, Instagram today announced a new feature allowing users to send their live videos right to the Direct inbox of a follower or a group of them. It's kind of like performing a song on their front lawn and throwing rocks at their window to get them to notice.
Twitter can be a fun place to share and interact with your fellow humans. However, it can also be a wretched hive of scum and villainy. That's why keeping your Twitter direct messages open is a bit of a risk, but Twitter is rolling out a feature to keep the riffraff at bay. Soon, all DMs from strangers will be segregated from the messages you care about.
Instagram isn't just for posting pictures of food anymore. Whether you like it or not, the app has branched out to become a Snapchat competitor too, and now its direct messaging abilities are getting an upgrade.
Talking to a company's customer support rep isn't often a pleasurable experience, and sometimes it's made even more automated and less personal when getting replies from a nondescript "support" or "help" social media or email account without a face or name. That's an issue you could face on Twitter, when multiple reps are in charge of a company's account and presence, but depending on the company's policy, they either hide in anonymity or have to remember to sign messages with their initials or names to seem more approachable to users.
Twitter Direct Messages have never been my preferred messaging platform, but for those who do use it, there are a few new features —read receipts, typing indicators, and web link previews. If you use other services such as Facebook Messenger, Hangouts, Telegram, and WhatsApp, you've probably already seen these.
Several apps have been fast to adopt Android N's new Direct Reply functionality for quickly sending out an answer to a message from the notification without having to open the app first. Hangouts, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp have all done this in the past few months and now it's Twitter turn.
For quite a while, Twitter has been trying to make Direct Messages a thing, and today the latest improvement has arrived: a direct message button in tweets. Whether this will make anyone actually share a specific tweet in a private message, who knows, but it's there anyway. Keep in mind this button is only being added to Twitter's mobile apps; no word if it'll be added to the web app, or anywhere else for that matter.