Twitter drops 140 character limit on direct messages
Behold, social media fans: a revolution has taken place, after Twitter announced plans to scrap its 140-character limit. Well, on direct messages, anyway…
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Yep: in a blog post last night, Sachin Agarwal, a product manager at the company, confirmed Twitterers can now "chat on (and on)" in direct messages, the private messages exchanged between users.
"Each of the hundreds of millions of tweets sent across Twitter every day is an opportunity for you to spark a conversation about what's happening in the world," he enthused.
The move is thought to be targeted towards users of messaging apps such as Whatsapp and Facebook, on which there are no character limits.
Twitter's share price has plummeted in recent weeks after second quarter figures showed monthly user growth had slowed to 0.7 per cent. By contrast, in April figures from Facebook showed users of Whatsapp (which it bought for $19bn in 2014) had jumped 100m in four months, giving it a total of 800m monthly active users.
Will Twitter follow by scrapping its 140 character limit on public tweets? Unlikely for the time being, said Agarwal.
"Tweets will continue to be the 140 characters they are today, rich with commentary as well as photos, videos, links, Vines, gifs and emoji," he said.
