With social media taking center stage in consumers’ digital lives, many companies have turned to the medium to better connect and engage with them.
Twitter has recently made an official announcement that they are removing the 140-character limit from Direct Messages.
Revealed for the first time on the Twitter Developers forum, the popular social network announced that starting in July 2015 direct messages will have a 10,000-character limit. To help businesses that leverage Twitter to engage with their consumers, it has released a couple new API updates that were created in order to help businesses update their code in order to retrieve the new, longer messages.
It should be noted that in the announcement Twitter stated that the removal of the character limit on direct messages will not affect public tweets.
The move doesn’t remove Twitter’s design choice of constraining tweets to 140 characters — only direct messages. “It’s a beautiful constraint that has inspired a whole new form of writing,” Twitter investor Chris Sacca wrote in a long blog post earlier this month about what Twitter can do to improve. Sacca did not say he had a problem with the 140-character cap on DMs, and that’s what’s changing.
Direct messages in other social networks, like Facebook and LinkedIn, don’t have length limits. Still, Twitter’s affinity for the 140-character limit goes back to its earliest days, when the microblogging service sent tweets in text messages.