No more limits when sending direct messages on Twitter

Jun 12, 2015 07:49 GMT  ·  By

The Twitter dev team has announced that they intend to remove the 140 character limit for DMs (direct messages) on their service starting July 2015. This does not alter the length of public messages, however, which will remain the same.

Technically, the move makes a lot of sense, since Twitter's DMs are just like PMs on Facebook or emails sent through Gmail or Yahoo.

They have absolutely no effect on your Twitter timeline or public interactions, and the limit has always been a nuisance. Imagine how hard it would be to break up every email into 140-character thoughts.

After it has recently been announced that Facebook Messenger was downloaded over one billion times on Android devices, by freeing up the DM character limit, Twitter will try and get a piece of the pie on the IM market.

In other Twitter news...

We don't actually know if this update to the DM limit was a veiled attempt at burying the news that Twitter CEO Dick Costolo just resigned, but this sure looks like a basic PR misdirection tactic they teach in college marketing classes.

And to make sure the DM story has a solid ally, another Twitter-related piece of news came out just about the same time.

This one is related to the company's market presence, Twitter announcing that new offices will open in Singapore and will help manage its Asia-Pacific region, one of its strongest sectors.

Besides being closer to its Japanese and South Korean markets where Twitter is very popular, the company is also eying India and Indonesia, countries with huge populations but a very limited Twitter presence.

The new offices also place it closer to China, where authorities have blocked access to the social network altogether since 2009, and a market Twitter is yearning for since it would allow it to take a huge leap and get closer to Facebook and Google when it comes to user numbers.