Popular video-sharing app TikTok has expanded its DM features, including the ability to let any user message another.
The company began sending emails to TikTok users informing them of the recently added options to DM.
TikTok seems to be expanding into private messaging, as it competes with tech rivals, YouTube, which has an interactive comment section below each video.
Instagram and Snapchat have various public features, and one of their core is private messaging to users on the platform. TikTok's move can be interpreted as a step towards competing with social sites like Instagram, The Verge reported.
Through Settings, and then Privacy, users can access the DM options, and who can send them messages, from a list of suggested friends, mutual friends, and anyone, while filtering out suspicious spam messages.
The feature could instantly make TikTok a messaging app, enabling its users to DM their favorite creators.
TikTok, deployed in China as Douyin, is a short-form video hosting service owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. It hosts user-submitted videos, which can range in duration from 15 seconds to 10 minutes.
TikTok is an entirely separate, internationalized version of Douyin, which was released in the Chinese market in September 2016. It launched in 2017 for iOS and Android in most markets outside of mainland China; however, it became available worldwide only after merging with another Chinese social media service, Musical.ly, on 2 August 2018.
TikTok and Douyin have almost the same user interface but no access to each other's content. Their servers are each based in the market where the respective app is available. The two products are similar, but their features are not identical. Douyin includes an in-video search feature that can search by people's faces for more videos of them, along with other features such as buying, booking hotels, and making geo-tagged reviews.
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