Twitter seems to be heavily leaning towards building on its discovery options, with the platform now working on the next stage of search for direct messages, with a new DM content search option found in the back-end code of the app.

Expert app researcher Alessandro Paluzzi was kind enough to grace us with an example of this new functionality. By the look of it, Twitter is on the verge of developing a more advanced message search option, which would enable you to sift through all of your DMs for specific keywords or mentions, helping you filter through chats to find specific topics. The coming update could significantly advance Twitter’s prior update to ‘Search for People and Groups’, enabling you to find DM chats based on the usernames of those involved.

Here’s the official Tweet.

Sliding Into DMs

While it can be handy, especially in certain scenarios where you would need to find specific lines or messages, it’s not as helpful as contextual search would be, which gives you the capacity to filter your DMs based on mentions and keywords, greatly improving the overall search process.

Twitter has experimented with more advanced DM search options in the past, such as searching within a specific DM thread for shared media and links, but the ability to search by message content would be the most significant development. Of course, certain privacy considerations do need to be accounted for in such a process, but adding in keyword search for DM text is rather helpful indeed. This new update could potentially make Twitter DMs a more useful tool, finally bringing it forward after years of stagnation. At least Spaces isn’t the only element growing on Twitter this year.

It could also be highly beneficial for your Twitter customer service efforts. Providing more search tools does streamline your DM response – for example, you could search all users who’ve asked a question about a product and provide relevant updates as they come up. Now, this doesn’t necessarily equate to faster response times but leans towards giving more accurate and quality replies to inquiries, discussions, and concerns.

At the very least, at least it helps get Twitter messaging a little bit more attention and a sense of dynamism. There’s a range of ways on how this can be used, but there’s just not enough info presently to be able to accurately determine the extent of the new option’s usefulness. Either way, at least it saves messaging on Twitter from completely falling behind pro-messaging competitors such as Messenger and Telegram.

The Wrap

The challenge Twitter has with discovery seems to be evident even when talking about messaging. It seems clear now what the platform should really focus on this year. While they can attempt to develop their capacities on different fronts, without addressing the core issue, all their attempts will either end in failure or end up being successful in the beginning, only to fall into obscurity not too long after.

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Sources 

https://bit.ly/33bQO65