You Can Now Send Private Group Messages on Twitter

Twitter is rolling out a new group direct messaging feature, the company said Tuesday.

With the new feature, you’ll be able to privately chat with up to 20 people at a time. When you add somebody to a group chat, they’ll get a notification letting them know. The people you pick to add to your group chat don’t need to be following one another to enter the chat.

Group DMs might finally do away with “Twitter canoes,” long public conversations in which precious message space often get swallowed up by participants’ handles. The new feature is also a fresh sign Twitter is thinking about ways to make its typically very public service more intimate at a time when it faces competition from the rise of direct mobile messaging apps like WhatsApp, WeChat and Facebook Messenger.

Twitter also said Tuesday it’s introducing a way to record, edit and post videos directly within its mobile app. Most Twitter users looking to share video content on the service previously used Vine, a standalone app Twitter acquired back in 2012.

Expect both new features to appear on your Twitter app “in the coming days,” the company says.

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