Twitter says improvements to Direct Messages coming next week, native video features coming in 2015

Twitter today shared a few details about its plans for the social network in 2015 including some new features around video, improvements to communicating with Direct Messages on the service, and changes to the timeline to help keep up with relevant content.

In the video department, Twitter announced that it plans to integrate native video capturing and sharing into the service with a rollout slated sometime during the first half of 2015. The new feature will include the ability to “record, edit and share” video without leaving the Twitter. Thus far, the social network has focused its video efforts on Vine, the video sharing social network it acquired and launched early last year.

In addition to the promise of native video features, Twitter also said it looks to improve the Direct Messaging experience on the platform with upcoming updates. With an update expected to ship to users starting next week, Twitter says it will add the ability to “share and discuss Tweets natively and privately” over private Direct Messages. This sounds like tweets will become embeddable, at least on Twitter’s official apps, which could at least solve the problem of some tweet URLs not being shareable over DMs.

Finally, Twitter expects to introduce the ability to “surface highlights of what you missed and show those to you as soon as you log back in or come back to the app” to help users who follow a large number of accounts to catch up with Twitter after taking a break from the social network. While the changes sound like Twitter could start to look different for some users, the social network said it’s “still preserving the real-time nature of the platform” as well.

Twitter recently rolled out interactive notifications for its iPhone app and new photo sharing features for its Mac app. You can grab the latest versions of Twitter for iPhone and iPad and Twitter for Mac from each App Store for free.