No 140 character limit for Direct Messages on Twitter from July
Starting July, Twitter is all set to remove the 140 characters limit but for its direct messaging services only, the site announced. However, there are no changes in the public-facing tweets. In other words, there are going to be no changes for regular users except for those who use Twitter for chats with their followers.
Sachin Agarwal, DM product manager posted API recommendations for developers so as to โmake this change as seamless as possibleโ. The announcement regarding the change was made ahead of time to Twitterโs developer community so that third-party apps can support it from launch, will raise the character limit on direct messages from 140 characters to 10,000. For instance, Facebook Messanger has a character limit of 20,000.
โWeโve done a lot to improve direct messages over the past year and have much more exciting work on the horizonโ, said Sachin Agarwal. โYou may be wondering what this means for the public side of Twitter. Nothing! Tweets will continue to be the 140 characters they are today.โ
In the coming weeks, the DM revision will be tested before it is widely put into effect next month. The alteration removes the need to send multiple private messages in one conversation.
Twitterโs thinking towards its direct messaging feature has changed widely due to its history. For many years, the service was abandoned, which led to many people think if the company was planning to stop the service altogether. Notifications were breaking that led to users missing the messages; read counts failed to sync or reflect whether a message had been read at all; and a bug in the spam detection feature stopped users from sending links in DMs for over a year, even as Twitter asserted that it was a valuable anti-spam feature and not a bug.
However, the internal feelings towards DMs apparently warmed towards the end of 2014. The bugs that were existing for a long time were fixed, new features were introduced, that included sending of pictures in DMs, create and join group DMs, and receive DMs from users who are not followers.
“I assume Twitter has done analysis of users and found this is a source of frustration,โ said Michael Mulvey, assistant professor of marketing at the University of Ottawaโs Telfer School of Management. Mulvey continued: โOr, perhaps itโs an opportunity to stop users substituting Twitter for other platforms like Google or Facebook.โ
“It grates against the core aspect of their brand identity,โ said Mulvey. โTwitter has always been about succinct messages. Itโs losing a unique quality but I donโt think it will arouse much of a backlash. โIt may encourage some gentle ribbing. Iโve seen a few people say weโre going back to AOL again.โ
Steve Ladurantaye, head of news and government partnerships of the Twitter said the move is, โjust to make Twitter even more awesomeโ. The change could be a sign of the times to come.