Twitter's CEO Tells Us His Vision For Changing Twitter Messaging

It's all the rage right now in the tech industry thanks in part to Facebook, which paid $19 billion for WhatsApp, the global messaging phenomenon. Facebook also carved out Facebook messenger (which has over 200 million users) as a standalone mobile app.

Then there's Line, the Japanese messaging app that's growing quickly. There's WeChat, a Chinese chat app. There's Snapchat, Yo, TapTalk, Bolt, Confide, and about a bajillion other apps out there.

Not to mention, we have old school ways of keeping in touch like email, texting, and - gasp! - phone calls.

And yet, in this crowded space, Twitter's CEO Dick Costolo believes Twitter can make an impact. On the company's earnings call Tuesday, he said Twitter would be working on building out its direct messaging feature.

After the call, we got on the phone with Costolo to talk about messaging. Here's what he said when we asked him about Twitter's plans for messaging:

Specifically, being able to take a public conversation and being able to migrate it to a private channel. So, taking a public tweet, and being able to have a conversation about that public tweet with a private group of people is a compelling use case. One we see internally as something a lot of us would like to do and one that will be a real engagement driver for us.

It sounds like Twitter wants to make it easier to take the conversations that happen publicly and carve them out in their own private space. It's slightly different than just messaging back and forth, which is what we do with Twitter messaging right now.