Twitter back in July said that it’ll relax the 140-character limit in its Direct Messages to a whopping 10,000 characters, and starting today the feature has officially been introduced in its Direct Messages. However, the 140-character limit on public tweets still stays the same.
In addition, the company’s standalone app for live video streaming – Periscope now officially announces it has two million active users who use the live streaming app on a daily basis. The company today officially released figures giving the public a taste of their progress in a rather short time-span.
To recall, Periscope was launched on March 26 on the iOS, followed by its Android counterpart in May. Since then it has seen 10 million accounts being registered for the live streaming app. All in all, users on Periscope are watching 40 years of broadcast on a daily basis, says the company.
Periscope essentially allows its users to broadcast a live stream of their videos captured on their smartphones to other Periscope users, and can then link the stream on Twitter to get more views. The company stressed upon the fact that its daily active users and the duration of video stats purely relate to users who use the app on their smartphones rather than the Web.
Notably, even YouTube now stresses the importance of how much time users spend watching a particular video, as opposed to counting the number of viewers or views. A broadcaster’s success is measured by the amount of time users spend watching their broadcasts, adds Periscope.
Periscope’s rival as of now is Meerkat, which was apparently also launched in March and since then has seen 700,000 users signing-up for the service in the first seven weeks, while it reached two million users by early May. However, its access was cut-off from Twitter, which eventually allowed Periscope to race ahead of its competition.
Periscope was apparently ranked the eighth and ninth most popular social networking app on the Play Store and AppStore respectively according to App Annie, which is a substantial lead over rival Meerkat ranked 186 and 316 on the Play Store and AppStore respectively.
Twitter sneakily acquired Periscope for a hefty $100 million, which some suggested was one of the most expensive acquisitions from the company. The micro-blogging site has been ramping up video capabilities on its network, testing video ads and also allowing users to upload and edit their videos.
For now, Periscope may be in the lead, but in the near future it might see immense competition form Facebook, as the social networking giant just announced a new feature ‘Live’ to its ‘Mentions app’, used by prominent musicians, athletes and politicians, which enables them to broadcast live video to their Facebook fans.
