Twitter, the micro-blogging platform known for restricting posts to 140 characters, is abandoning its roots and removing the space limit for its private messages.
The big change in direct messages (DM) was announced over Twitter's developer blog on Thursday, the same day Twitter CEO Dick Costolo handed in his resignation letter over his continued failure to improve Twitter's products and services and expand its user base to please its investors.
In preparation for the major change, Twitter encourages its developers to review the API changes, update their GET requests to receive the full length of DMs and tweak their app's interface to accommodate longer DMs.
Starting July, Twitter users will be able to send DMs to other people that are up to 10,000 characters long. That is about five pages of a Microsoft Word document with regular font and margin sizes, compared to the paltry 140 character DMs users are used to sending each other over the micro-blogging site.
"We've done a lot to improve Direct Messages over the past year and have much more exciting work on the horizon," says Sachin Agarwal, product manager for Direct Message at Twitter. "One change coming in July that we want to make you aware of now (and first!) is the removal of the 140 character limit in Direct Messages."
For years, users could only send 140-character DMs to one person at a time. However, newer and more popular messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Snapchat and Messenger by Twitter's social network rival Facebook are taking users away from Twitter's slow-growing platform.
It appears that Twitter is taking a page out of Facebook's playbook to renew its messaging function. Earlier this year, Twitter launched group direct messages, which lets users send the same short messages to a group of people instead of just one person.
This was followed by the ability to send anyone a DM, a feature that allows big companies and celebrities to message their followers even when they don't follow them. Previously, users had to follow one another in order to have a private conversation on the platform.
Speculations even abound that Twitter is taking messaging so seriously that it is thinking of creating a standalone DM app similar to Facebook Messenger. As Owen Williams of The Next Web says, Twitter posted job listings looking for employees to work on its messaging app.
Next up: standalone DM app https://t.co/WSvPHWFQPv
— Owen Williams (@ow) June 11, 2015
Twitter says the removal of the character limit is only for DMs. As for public tweets, users will continue to have to compress their complicated thoughts and opinions into 140 characters and rack up tweet storms when they can't.
"You may be wondering what this means for the public side of Twitter," says Agarwal. "Nothing! Tweets will continue to be the 140 characters they are today."
Photo: Esther Vargas | Flickr
