Twitter users can now write more in their direct messages! Taking effect next month, the 140-character limit for DMs will be gone, the social media company announced the news on its developer blog on Thursday, foxnews.com reports.
Twitter's attitude to its direct messaging feature has varied wildly over its history. Many wondered if the feature was about to be removed since it was all but abandoned for years. Read counts failed to sync, or reflect whether a message had been read at all; notifications were flaky, leading users to miss messages; and a bug in the spam detection feature prevented users from sending links in DMs for over a year, even as Twitter insisted that it was not a bug at all, but a valuable anti-spam feature.
This change, which is one of the several done to the private messaging element of the app, is set to improve Twitter and compete more effectively to other messaging apps in the market like WhatsApp. Before the end of last year, the San Francisco-based company addressed the longstanding bugs, and added new features like photo sharing In DMS, create and join DM groups, and receive DMs from users who are not followers.
Many wondered why the move has not been done earlier, considering that it will prove very useful to users. For instance, customer service agents can now reach users about a particular issue without having to send several different messages to deliver a detailed response.
"We've done a lot to improve Direct Messages over the past year and have much more exciting work on the horizon," Twitter's Sachin Agarwal said in the message to developers.
Starting July 1, the character limit for direct messages will increase from 140 to 10,000. How about that? But for comparison, Facebook messenger has a 20,000-character limit, theguardian.com reports.
"We've done a lot to improve direct messages over the past year and have much more exciting work on the horizon", said Twitter's product manager for direct messages Sachin Agarwal. "You may be wondering what this means for the public side of Twitter. Nothing! Tweets will continue to be the 140 characters they are today."
Yes, unfortunately, the company shows no sign of changing the 140-character limit for public tweets.
