I’ve not visited Twitter settings lately so I’m not sure if the one month old Twitter DMs from anyone feature reached Kenyans. If not then Kenyans did not have the chance, and probably will not have that chance, to witness first hand the ugly experiences whatever they were that made Twitter pull out Twitter DMs from anyone functionality.
The feature was intended to allow Twitter accounts especially corporate accounts to receive Twitter DMs from anyone that follow them without having the need to follow back. Since the debut of Twitter, DMs are only possible from those you follow so for a corporate account to receive DMs from their followers, they need to follow them back too.
The fact that you have to follow anyone back to receive DMs is problematic to corporates like Safaricom who use social media to provide customer care services. These corporate accounts have over 100K followers that in most cases need to provide confidential information (phone numbers and confidential transactions) in order to have their peculiar problems attended to. Twitter did well to allow such accounts to receive DMs without having to follow the customers back. It is therefore a setback to corporates if Twitter DMs from anyone can’t work for whatever reasons. I hope Twitter will go back to the drawing board and find out how they can allow this useful feature to come back. Other accounts that could have found this feature useful are the celebrities.
One reason that might have led Twitter to discontinue is spamming. To protect users from receiving spam messages, Twitter had disallowed links from being shared via DM. However this limited the extent to which DMs can serve tweeps given that at times people want to share some “private links” via DM.
Anyhow not everything beautiful is useful. The reverse is true.
That’s not true. It has always been the case the you could only receive DMs from those that you follow. Unless I’m reading your post wrong.
Normally you can only receive DMs from those you follow, but Twitter tried a feature to enable people to receive DMs from virtually anyone i.e. you didn’t have to follow them. If for instance I wanted to send you a DM all I needed to do is to follow you (you don’t have to follow back) then if you enabled DMs from anyone I could then send you a DM. They have discontinued this feature and reverted back to the normal method where you only get DMs from those you follow.
Ah I see. I missed that feature rollout. Thanks for clarifying.