After previewing future platform enhancements and features during its Analyst’s Day event, the popular social service Twitter on Thursday began rolling out one of the mentioned new features: the ability to private share a tweet through Twitter’s direct messaging function.
Think about sharing tweets privately with any of your followers in terms of discussing public content in private conversations, the micro-blogging platform suggested.
To do this from Twitter’s main iPhone client, long-press the tweet in your timeline and choose the new “Share via Direct Message” option. The person you share a tweet with will get a push notification, said the company.
Moreover, the tweet will display directly in the conversation.
“Twitter is already a great place for public conversation; now it’s also easier to privately discuss things you care about,” a company blog post proclaims.
Just recently, Twitter’s added support for sharing links and photos in Direct Messages. And yesterday, the team enabled an advanced search feature which finally permits us to search through Twitter’s entire archive of public tweets sent since 2006.
In addition to Twitter for iOS and Android, the new private sharing feature has gone live in the web interface and Twitter’s TweetDeck app. To share a tweet privately on twitter.com or in TweetDeck, tap the “••• More” icon and choose the “Share via Direct Message” option.
Here’s an animated GIF showing off private sharing in action.
Download Twitter for iOS and OS X for free.
TweetDeck is available at no cost for the web, Chrome and Windows. The Mac edition, available free of charge in the Mac App Store, will gain the private sharing feature soon, as will Twitter’s main Mac client and the iPad app.
Check out the screenshot below showing private sharing via DMs on an iPhone, courtesy of MacStories’s Federico Viticci.
Private sharing is among a bunch of enhancements and new platform features coming to the micro-blogging platform throughout 2015. As the startup itself outlined last week, they’ll be adding the ability to record, edit and upload video natively from within its own app.
Other goodies in tow for 2015: new ad units, an Instant Timeline feature, additional messaging capabilities, new standalone apps like Vine, a “While You Were Away” feature showing the best tweets since you last logged in, more ways to get logged-out visitors to join (or at least earn money on them) and so forth.