Does Twitter need a group chat feature? Would you use it?

According to the company’s CFO, group chat is one of the functions high up on their future innovation list. Speaking at the Citi Global Technology Conference in New York, Twitter’s Anthony Noto hinted that the company is looking into direct messaging between multiple users – clearly Twitter’s foray into group chat. As of now, users can only direct message one other user at a time.

In the context of discussing a football game, Noto had this to say, per The Wall Street Journal:

“I’m not sure I want to have (that) conversation in front of my boss and the rest of the 271m global users. I might want to take that to a private setting which you can do through direct messaging. Today you can only do that one to one as opposed to one to many. So that’s an example of innovation around sharing or expression that we can pursue over time.”

In other news from Noto’s talk, Twitter’s head of product has apparently put search at the forefront of his priorities.

“If you think about our search capabilities we have a great data set of topical information about topical tweets, the hierarchy within search really has to lend itself to that taxonomy,” said Noto. He went on to say Twitter needs “an algorithm that delivers the depth and breadth of the content we have on a specific topic and then eventually as it relates to people.”

Messaging is big right now. Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19 billion dollars. Snapchat is reportedly worth $10 billion. Facebook just unbundled and turned a lot of its focus to a standalone messenger app. Every day, millions of people use Twitter to communicate – but mostly publicly. It sort of makes sense for Twitter to want to give its users a way to chat privately and more efficiently.

Image via Rosaura Ochoa, Flickr Creative Commons