On December 10, 2013, Twitter announced an update to its apps that bring a new design and renewed focus on direct messaging. The app now features a direct link to Direct Messages in the tab bar and allows users to send photos inside DMs for the first time.
Before the official announcement, DMs were just private extensions of Twitter itself; 140 character messages from one person to another. With the latest update, picture sharing will be added into DM functionality on the mobile application as well as the website.
With the new update, Twitter added several new features, but the addition of photo support to DMs and the enhanced placement of the icon right in the tab bar indicated a renewed interest in the private messaging portion of Twitter.
The update may not be dramatic, but actually packs a pretty decent punch. Especially when it comes to photo sharing in DM.
With messaging and chat business becoming a popular hit today, Twitter that introduced "report abuse" in August 2013, is performing its own stunts by providing "subtweets". The DM function of Twitter is heavily used by a lot of users, and Twitter sees this as an opportunity to enhance user experience.
The DM feature is also much more prominently displayed in the navigation bar, rather than buried in an inconvenient place. With photos can now be sent back and forth via DM, it should help Twitter compete with photo-sharing apps like Snapchat, which are meant for sharing private moments instead of displaying them in public.
The Twitter app also got an upgrade when it comes to switching feeds. This major redesign has been in the works for a while, and for the first time, Twitter has placed all these elements in one place. Twitter has been testing a variety of these features over the past few weeks, but now they're all packaged together.
The ability to swipe between timelines on the app, is a feature that was floating around the rumor before the company's IPO.
Before the official release, users may have seen the DM icon in the tab bar or heard of some users getting a swipe-able timeline design as a part of Twitter's ongoing experiments which see just a small percentage of users getting each permutation of the design. Those experiments are then used to determine which features hit the app itself.
Many things have moved around the interface of Twitter. The Home, Discover, and Activity tabs are all located at the top now so users can swipe between the three sections with ease. This encourages exploration of the different sections of the app like the Discover tab where trending topics and hashtags are displayed.
"Now you can swipe from your Home timeline to the Discover timeline to find trends, popular Tweets and new accounts tailored for you, and then swipe to your Activity timeline to see Tweets and accounts that are popular among people you follow," said Jeremy Gordon, Twitter's Senior Director of Product Engineering.
Now, moving from the Home timeline to the Discover timeline to the Activity timeline is a simple matter of swiping left or right. That should make it easier to track trends on Twitter, as well as keep up-to-date on who is favoriting and retweeting.
Notifications, messages, user look up, and search are persistent at the top of the app, allowing quick access to these features from anywhere within the app. The compose window is also a persistent bar at the bottom with quick access to attaching or taking a photo. vThe new feature has created a new buzz regarding how Twitter sees itself as a once "simple" yet "effective" place to share. The update packs several additional capabilities that some find it a little too sophisticated for the 140 character social media.