Not known for being one of Twitter’s most popular features, the social media site has defied expectations with rumours that they’re working on a ‘DM’ only app.
The uses for the social media web are practically endless. Between Twitter, LinkedIn and yes, even Facebook, business partnerships, friendships and valuable contacts can be made as people share helpful resources and insights into their lives via the Internet. In the former, however, the ‘social’ part of social media can be a double-edged sword, as Twitter can be both a collection of helpful professional uses, links and things to make your day even happier or, it can be a dumping ground of celebrity lunch pictures. As such, Twitter have thus far struggled to make much of a profit, recently preparing to go live on the global stock exchange, but now, with the possibility of a direct messaging app, the micro-blogging site looks set to turn that around.
Direct Messages, or ‘DMs’ as they’re also known, actually aren’t one of the most popular features of Twitter and they’ve even led some employees to talk about discarding the feature from the site altogether. However, information presented in the companies IPO documents (used to get Twitter onto the stock market) reveal that they see other messaging services, such as WhatsApp, Line and KakaoTalk (which was named specifically in the IPO filing) as competitors for their slice in the messaging market. As a result, Twitter are considering launching a DM-only app letting users privately message each other by way of the social media giant.
The rumours for this were recently renewed, as just this week, Twitter began to roll out plans to let anyone DM any other Twitter user, where before, the case was that both parties had to be following each other (or they could DM you if you were following them, but you couldn’t reply). Not only do some sources say that Twitter are working on such an app, it’s also known that earlier in the year, Twitter met with employees from ‘MessageMe’, a mobile-messaging app which offers a very similar service to that of a proposed Direct Messaging application. Twitter, when asked about the rumours, declined to comment, only adding much fuel to an already blazing fire of tech speculation.
We’ll keep you posted once we know more.
Source: AllThingsD
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