Twitter is best known as a text-based social media platform. But now the bird site is preparing to expand into audio and video calls.
Designer Andrea Conway teased the upcoming feature in a tweet on Friday with the words “ring ring.” Rather than offer a video demo, Conway merely shared a screenshot, which appears to be carefully mocked up. Nevertheless, the image shows two users conversing over Twitter’s direct messages on their smartphones. The only difference is that the messaging function contains two buttons, one for audio calls and the other for video calls.
The next image shows the two people talking in a video call with crystal clear picture quality.
We’ll have to wait and see how well the feature works, including whether it offers group calls or end-to-end encryption — perks already offered in other video-calling services. Still, the calling functionality promises to make Twitter even more useful while taking traffic away from other apps such as Meta’s WhatsApp and Apple’s FaceTime.
The feature also brings Elon Musk a step closer to making Twitter a "super app" that can be used beyond social media for other tasks such as mobile messaging and even banking. Twitter recently received “money transmitter” licenses in three states.
Twitter is also working on the audio/video calling feature as it faces growing competition from Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, which this week released a Twitter-like app in Threads. The app has now received over 70 million sign-ups. But in response, a lawyer for Musk sent a letter to Zuckerberg, threatening to sue Meta for allegedly stealing Twitter’s trade secrets to create the "copycat" version of Twitter.