A Few Ways To Better DMS

Twitter has become one of my essential daily tools. I have set it up as a service that I get all my news from, connect with certain people and follow a lot of people that I admire and respect. A few months ago, they released some updates to DMs but there were a few things that I would love to see. It was a good start, but this is such an underused feature.

More video support - Hangouts is my main messaging system, but there is a terrible support to share videos. Twitter has support for videos you shoot in the app, but it does not work in the messaging feed. But, I want like to be able to upload something from my camera roll and send over. The only messaging app that has a wealth of options to send media is Facebook. I have always resisted it, but they are making it harder.

A separate app - When this trend started I hated it. But, since Twitter is so public. I think it would help with people becoming more comfortable with usage. It would be amazing to see all of the messages floods into the feed if it were a fully featured part of the service.

Twitter Cards in conversations - Streaming songs inside the chat app. I’d love to be able to have actionable items in chat. I’d like to see a little popup window for YouTube videos while in mid chat. Have you ever tried to recommend a friend to install an app in Google Play. How amazing would it be to see that link converted into an install button with a short description?

I hate email - We all hate it, and we all want it to go away. Maybe this is an area where Twitter can make some inroads. Facebook is updating messenger to work with business during the checkout flow. I still do a tremendous amount of talking via email. Being able to subscript to individual updates to get pushed to your phone.

Impromptu conversations - There is a lot of times when I shared links in twitter and sent an email or add a new text or hangouts. It would be nice to have this instant sharing and conversations develop over a topic. If someone is talking about something in their public feed easily being able to bring that conversation into a private or small group setting could be interesting to see unfold.