Twitter Gets Rid of 140-Character Limit on DMs

Just recently, Twitter made a couple of announcements on its developer blog regarding their upcoming plans for July. To start with, the first announcement they made was the fact that Dick Costolo will no longer be a CEO for the company. As for the more exciting news, the 140-character limit on their DMs (direct messages) will be removed. With this new announcement, Twitter users will no longer have to put a limit on the number of characters on the private messages they send out to other users. 

When Twitter first started out, they gave their users the ability to privately chat with other individuals through the Direct Message feature. However, it never became a core feature of their highly successful website. Instead, users insisted on using Twitter to publicly share short updates with those who follow them. Considering Twitter has some pretty serious competition from other social network sites to keep up with, it's about time they do something relevant for their users. By removing the 140-character limit, their DM feature may just be patronized by its users.

This announcement is definitely a step in the right direction. And it truly shows that Twitter executives are working hard to stay as a relevant social network site. Earlier this year, Twitter made a couple of other changes to direct messages. First of all, they launched group direct messages, a feature that allowed multiple users to use the service so they could chat at the same time. Later on, they allowed users to send private messages to one another. This permitted users to message one another without having to follow each other before a private conversation can be started.

Starting July, the 140-character limit imposed on direct messages will no longer be observed. However, the same character limit is still used on users' tweets. The 140-character limit was first imposed when Twitter gave its users an option to post a tweet by sending a text message. At that time, the SMS character limit was 160. Twitter used this as a basis for tweets with a 140-character limit for tweets and 20-character limit for the username. Despite the fact that this SMS character limit is no longer applicable in this day and age, Twitter continues to use the 140-character limit on tweets to keep public messages short. And since this is what separates Twitter from other social network sites, this same concept must be working pretty well.