Twitter has officially launched its New Direct Message Overlay to All Desktop Users
After testing it out over the past few months, Twitter has now officially launched its new direct message chat window on the desktop, which enables users to engage with their messages without having to leave their main tweet feed.
As you can see here, the addition provides a mini, picture-in-picture display for your DMs, which is similar to the desktop messaging functionality on both LinkedIn and Facebook. When you get a new DM, the window will expand, and you can collapse it any time – or engage in the DM discussion via the smaller screen.
As noted, Twitter has been testing the option over the last few months, with reverse engineering expert Jane Manchun Wong posting these screenshots back in April.
As with all platforms, Twitter is seeing increased usage of direct messaging as people reduce their public posting activity, and it’s rolled out a range of DM updates and feature additions over the past year to align with this shift.
As such, this new addition makes sense – though Twitter users will undoubtedly be upset to have their regular tweet experience interrupted by the new window popping-up when they get a message. If that sounds like you, you can also switch if off. Oh wait, no you can’t, you can only minimize it.
Still, the interruptive capacity of the options is fairly minimal, and it will make it easier for some users to engage via DM.
