The Twitter DM was rather dull for so many years. It was a simple tool for communicating 140 characters at a time in private with someone. However, the past year, Twitter has been focusing on improving it since it was rather pale when considering with what other companies were offering. Today, they have announced a huge upgrade and it includes features we have seen and used in other dedicated messaging apps.
You can now read receipts
Receipts are now standard in dedicated apps like Messenger or Whatsapp where they inform you if your message was read by the other party. This has now been added to the DM as now you will be notified by the classic blue tick that will show you that the message was read.
Typing indicators
In messaging apps, the animated typing icon is usually a small but crucial feature. When someone is indicated as ‘typing’, it informs you that they are online and you can continue chatting with them at the time. This has now been ported over to the DM and it is a great improvement since it was rather robotic with the previous system where you had to rely on notifications to know if someone is online.
Web link previews
This was introduced a while ago on the general timeline but has been added rather recently on dedicated Messaging apps (looking at you WhatsApp). They usually give you an idea of the link being shared privately and can be quite useful to the other party you are chatting with.
Does this mean that Twitter will make the DM a separate app? I wished for the idea last year and so far they have added CRM tools and the 10,000 character limit
