Twitter Lengthens Video To 140 Seconds, Creates App For Influencers

Twitter takes small but meaningful steps on video.

The top social platforms are fighting a battle over video. Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat all want video, they want lots of it, and they want the best of it. Today, Twitter is taking a small but meaningful step forward by lengthening its video limit from 30 seconds to 140 — effectively reducing the need to tweet links to videos from YouTube and Facebook.

Some Twitter ad partners can already tweet longer videos via Twitter's Amplify program (you can identify those by their URLs, which start with amp.twimg.com), but this update will be applicable to everyday users who want to tweet longer videos.

To go along with the longer videos, Twitter is creating a new way to watch them. It's introducing a new video viewer (pictured above) that takes up the whole screen and suggests other videos to watch.

Twitter is also releasing a new app, called Twitter Engage, that's meant for users with big followings, though it will be available to everyone. Engage will provide power users with better analytics, among other things, and it may help Twitter keep them using its products. Last December, a group of Vine stars met with Twitter and asked the company to cut them a check for their work on the platform. No such payment has been issued.

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