Twitter-owned Periscope tallies 10 million users
Not everything is turning sour for social network Twitter. Its Periscope live video streaming app has tallied 10 million users since launching back in March.
Interestingly, as of last week, users are viewing more than 40 years of live video per day through the iOS and Android apps. That’s a pretty impressive number.
In a blog post announcing the news, the company noted it is focusing on that metric instead of attempting to measure the number of active users on the service:
It’s most reflective of the value we’re creating for people and the world. Success for broadcasters means more time watched on their broadcasts. Success for the audience (viewers who are watching and participating in a Periscope) means more high quality broadcasts in their feeds that they want to watch and participate in. Success for broadcasters and their audience means success for Periscope.
Along with its own iOS app, Periscope is deeply integrated into Twitter. Users can share live video links directly with their followers.
While I’m usually not one to jump on the latest social networking trend, I’ve been really pleased with the quality of the video on Periscope. I’m interested to see what users can do with the service in the future.
And Twitter itself has recently rolled out a substantial change to its direct messaging feature. Originally announced earlier this summer, users no longer are confined to 140-character messages. DMs are now capped at 10,000 characters, which should allow more than enough space for users to get their entire point across.
As always, actual tweets will still be limited to 140 characters.
The change is rolling out on the Web and in Twitter’s official iOS app. Users of other third-party Twitter clients like Tweetbot or Twitterrific should also be able to take advantage of the much longer character limit without any issues.
While I definitely use Twitter, I’m not a big fan of the direct messaging system with either a 140- or 10,000-character limit. But I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the first step in moving the DM system into a separate app like Facebook Messenger.
For other news today, see: Good news: iPad mini 4 should support split-view multitasking, Late to the game, Rdio brings live radio to iOS, and Here are the most-played artists on Beats 1.
