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Twitter is about to become a much better messaging platform

Screen Shot 2015-06-11 at 4.02.23 PM

Twitter announced today that it will be effectively removing the character limit on Direct Messages between users sent through the social network. Previously DMs shared the same character limit as tweets which cap out at 140 characters before being unable to be sent.

While not everyone is thrilled about the nature of direct messages changing from limited texts to longer form communication, the move should help Twitter position private direct messaging as a stronger competitor against Apple’s iMessage and Facebook’s Messenger and WhatsApp.

The change follows other recent enhancements to direct messages including the ability to embed and share tweets. The changes better position Twitter’s direct messaging feature if the social network ever wanted to roll it out as a standalone app on mobile platforms.

Twitter announced the change to its private messaging service in a blog post to developers and added that tweet character limits will remain the same. Direct messages will carry the much higher character limit of 10,000 starting next month.

Moments after the announcement, Twitter also revealed in a tweet that the CEO of the social network will be leaving on July 1st. Dick Costolo is stepping down next month with co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey taking over as interim CEO in bit of a Steve Jobs fashion. Dorsey remains CEO of the payment service company Square, which he developed.

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Comments

  1. myke2241 - 9 years ago

    i know Twitter has its place but i feel that it is pretty over rated and pretty useless. others will disagree

    • 500,000,000 people would disagree with you. For on the minute news and things it’s unbeatable – but it’s a very acquired taste.

      • Oh, as a feature it’s great, in the same way that Instagram is great. But what confuses a lot of people is that it’s not a platform. It’s a single feature. A bullet on a spec sheet, not the whole of a product. Which is why they can’t make any money. They need to be acquired and integrated into a larger pie.

      • Bruno +1

      • myke2241 - 9 years ago

        Ya its not for me for sure. I have never been able to get into twitter. A friend of mine made me a bet that i would be on twitter in six months… still not on twitter and that was 6 years ago!

    • Yeah I know what you mean. Free text and picture and video messaging sucks.

  2. RP - 9 years ago

    I agree completely. It is easily better than any other messaging service if presented like that.

  3. leejtyler - 9 years ago

    Reblogged this on The Point of the Quill and commented:
    I made some predictions with business maneuverings and Twitter’s future. This follows along thoee lines. Wheteher you like Direct Messaging or not, once transformation to Twitter are visable on the ront end, this will be a neccessary step.

  4. Now they need to remove the artificial 140 character limit on tweets. It’s antiquated and useless. I’m not expecting the ability to push a book or even a whole article, but let’s get sensible and make it 1000 characters at the very least. At least that way it would be possible to construct a couple of coherent sentences.

    • mobileseeks - 9 years ago

      IMO that would kill Twitter. Only reason I like it is that you can follow people / companies on Twitter and they are forced to sum up their point to something I can scan quickly. If character limit was raised then I wouldn’t use it daily to scan stuff.

      • gkbrown - 9 years ago

        I agree with you in principle, but 140 characters is really not enough to say anything meaningful. How about just increasing it to 256 or 512?

      • 140 characters is plenty. Headlines… then link to the article. Sound bytes. If you can’t sum up something in 140, then it’s probably either 1) not important enough in the first place, or 2)needs a long email to explain.

    • David Whittington - 9 years ago

      Oh well. Twitter used to have the perfect fix for run-on and malformed sentences. So much for that.

  5. Andrew Messenger - 9 years ago

    thank god. i was beginning to wonder how i could conveniently send messages to my friends. glad twitter could step in and fill that void for us.

  6. TyRon KitzeRow - 9 years ago

    I’ll Keep it simple…Great!

Author

Avatar for Zac Hall Zac Hall

Zac covers Apple news, hosts the 9to5Mac Happy Hour podcast, and created SpaceExplored.com.