Image: bm.iphone/Flickr
Twitter has announced, much to the anger of most of Twitterdom , that read receipts are coming to Direct Messages. While once you could bask in the safety of feigning ignorance at your DM box, that privilege has now been eradicated in one fell panoptical swoop.Don't panic, though, because there's a way to disable read receipts from ruining your life.Twitter tells Motherboard that read receipts, while enabled by default, can be disabled by going into your account settings "at any time." Specifically, you should go into the "security and privacy" section of settings, then scroll all the way down. It looks like this:
It's not only read receipts coming, though. The micro blogging service also plans typing indicators and web link previews, in an obvious effort to morph the humble DM into more of chat service. In August, Twitter launched an embeddable DM button that can be pinned onto a website, boosting the DM's effectiveness for both businesses and consumers.BBM for BlackBerry gave most of us our first taste of read receipts. Apple then gave iOS users the chance to see whether their messages had been "read" and not just "delivered" in 2011.WhatsApp also gives us the eloquent double blue tick system. But both of these can be toggled off for maximum reply laziness. Services such as Facebook Messenger, however, do not give users the option to turn off read receipts, although plenty of browser extensions, including Unseen for Chrome, exist to mitigate that disaster.