Twitter is known for its renowned “140 character ” limit on tweets and Direct Messages. Well in a release statement for Twitter developers, starting July, the company will waiver the 140 character limit for Direct Messages. The company still maintains that the 140 character limit will still be present for tweets on the timeline.
Longer DMs make a lot of sense because of two reasons:
1. Twitter probably wants to make the DM like a sort of a messenger platform. It makes sense that DMs should be longer because that is the platform where people get more information from the other party. Limiting those messengers to 140 characters makes the whole DM experience tedious.
2. It may pull more active users on the site. By virtue of having longer conversations on the site, loyal users will be inclined more to using DMs for chatting as opposed to other chatting platforms.
I hope Twitter in the next few months integrate these features in the DMs so as to make it a proper messaging platform:
- In-app map sharing
- Video chats and video conferencing
- Free calling
- Voice DMs
- File sharing (Right now you can only share photos)
The company can also decide to release the DM as a separate chat app and include the above functionality. Like what Facebook did, the company revamped the Inbox into a fully fledged messaging app they aptly named “Facebook Messenger”. Facebook Messenger recently joined the exclusive 1 billion dollar downloads club, which was announced by David Marcus, the Vice President of Messaging Products at Facebook.
Imagine a scenario where they released the direct messages as a separate app, making it mandatory for new users to sign up for Twitter before using the app. They can also add a feature for current Twitter users to invite other users to the app. This will increase Twitter’s monthly user count positively, which the company needs now because its growth spurt has slumped over the years. In comparison, Facebook Messenger has 700 million monthly active users, which is more than double that of Twitter (302 million)
July seems to be a turning point for the company: New CEO and new features like shared block lists & longer DMs on the platform. We’ll be waiting to see other changes the company will undertake to gain more active users and increase revenue. It is trying to evolve in the competitive social media platform and it is hoping that these changes will make it establish itself securely, because loyal users wouldn’t want it to fade out from the limelight like MySpace, don’t we?
