Twitter has Begun Live Testing of its New DM chat Window on Desktop

Twitter has begun live testing of its new DM chat window on the desktop, which provides a Messenger-style, picture-in-picture display for your messaging discussions on the platform.

The new option displays active DM chats in a smaller, sub-window at the bottom right of the screen, which is similar to the same presentation of Messenger chats within Facebook, and also LinkedIn’s messaging chats.

Twitter has been testing the new format for a while – reverse engineering expert Jane Manchun Wong posted these screenshots of the same last month.

As with all Twitter updates, some users seem wholly offended that Twitter would seek to replicate Messenger-like features within the app, but the addition makes sense. As with all platforms, Twitter is seeing increased usage of direct messages as people reduce their public posting activity, and it’s been working to align with this, rolling out a range of DM updates and feature additions over the past year.

Making it easier to engage via DM while using the app makes sense, especially if you want to keep the conversation going while also checking through your various tweet feeds as you wait for your recipient/s to respond. It could also facilitate increased content sharing via DM – if you’re engaged in a discussion with a friend, for example, and a new tweet comes into your timeline that you want to share, you can easily add that into the discussion, and have both your timeline and the chat active on the screen.

Overall, it seems like a functional option – and one which you’ll be able to deactivate if you don’t want to see it, either way.

There’s no word on how widely this is being tested as yet, but it is now available to some users.