Twitter might be on its way to giving Facebook and LinkedIn some serious competition. Earlier today (June 12, 2015), the social media platform announced that it will be removing its 140 character limit and replacing it with a limit of 10.000 characters starting sometime next month.
It’s a welcomed piece of news for all the blue “birds” who enjoy twitting, but unfortunately the change only applies to direct messages (DMs) used for private conversations. Public twits will however still be restricted to 140 characters. At least for the foreseeable future.
Chris Sacca, Twitter investor, wrote a blog post earlier this month, addressing the issue and saying that the limit on public twits is a beautiful constraint that has inspired a new type of writing.
The micro-blog’s love of 140 character messages had deep roots as the service was initially conceived as a text messaging system for smartphones.
Sachin Agarwal, Twitter Product Manager, gave a statement informing that “We’ve done a lot to improve Direct Messages over the past year and have much more exciting work on the horizon. 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”.
One of the many improvements mentioned by Agarwal above took place earlier this year, in April, when Twitter starting allowing their users to choose whether or not they would like to receive direct messages from people that they do not follow on the social media platform, as opposed to only receiving direct messages from users that they already follow.
And if you are worried that users you do not follow will send you long messages that you are not interested in, the new feature will allow you to block this users from sending the new, extensive messages. All you will have to do once the feature rolls out, is to uncheck the “Receive Direct Messages from anyone” box that can be found in the Security and privacy section of your Twitter’s settings.
The micro-blog has seen an increase of active monthly users of 18 percent (18%) during the course of last year, successfully reaching 302 million active users monthly. The new feature allowing 10.000 characters per direct message is believed by users to be an attemped at drawing in even more people.
Image Source: adweek.com
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.