Twitter’s product manager Sachin Agarwal has revealed that the 140-character limit on direct message will be removed in July. The DM revision will be tested in the coming weeks before being widely deployed next month. With this there will be no need to send multiple messages in one conversation. However, Agarwal maintained that the 140 character limit on Tweets will remain in place, retaining the key unique feature of the platform.
Users can send DMs the that are up to 10,000 characters in length. These plans were slammed by privacy advocates who said it opened people up to abuse, but Twitter assured users this wasn’t the case and said users could control who messaged them in the Settings menu.
Although Twitter hasn’t – and seemingly doesn’t have any plans – to reduce the character limit on public tweets, it has made sharing content easier recently. For example, when a user wants to quote a tweet, they can now do so without using up any of their character limit because the tweet is embedded in the post.
Twitter, which said its ambition is to build ‘the largest daily audience in the world,’ is hoping to get more people to use the Direct Messages service and to get the people already using the service to engage with it more frequently.
