Twitter rolls out new group messaging and native video sharing features

Twitter is on a roll. Just days after launching its new tweet recap and translation features, it has officially introduced another pair from the handful of functional additions it announced a couple of months ago for its popular social networking service.

First up, there’s support for group direct messaging. This new Twitter feature has been a long time coming, especially considering the glut of mobile messaging apps that feature group chat in the market (most notably Facebook Messenger).

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On Twitter, you can start a private group conversation with any of your followers, who, by the way, need not follow one another in order to participate. Each group chat can support up to 20 people, and users who get added to group chats are duly notified.

Twitter mobile video capture

The other significant new feature in question is native mobile video support, separate from Twitter’s popular six-second looping video service, Vine. This lets you capture (on the spot or from the camera roll), edit, share, and play videos up to 30 seconds right from the Twitter app for iPhone, such as the very first one tweeted by this year’s Oscars host, Neil Patrick Harris: