14 DAY TRIAL // On the same day former CEO Dick Costolo resigned, Twitter announced it was removing its 140-character limit on DMs in one of the most PR textbook moves you're ever going to see from a US tech company.
Even if initially announced to mask and bury the news of its CEO's departure, this promised update is now coming to our devices, even if a month late than originally promised.
"Today’s change is another big step towards making the private side of Twitter even more powerful and fun," says Sachin Agarwal, Twitter Product Manager.
Translation: by removing the limit on private messages, Twitter is positioning itself from a tiny micro-blogging app / website, into the realm of instant messaging applications.
This appetite for change is a general trend in the company, which has been undergoing a facelift in recent months.
Twitter is preparing for the "new Twitter"
If you haven't heard by now, Twitter is also working on a secret project that got leaked to the media around the same time when its former CEO resigned - Project Lightning, which aims to transform the site from an avalanche of random tweets into a moderated news discovery service that caters to live and current events.
Additionally the company also allows users to enter their date of birth now, hoping to get more info on them and improve its ad delivery process.
And to top things off, Twitter also announced today the Full Archive Search API, a service that should help enterprises and marketers search a user's full tweets archive and deliver better ads based on his interests.
You can read between the lines that Twitter is suffering from a mid-life crisis and is currently focusing on features that will either increase its appeal in the eyes of users or will allow it to monetize its userbase with more efficiency.
The company is desperate for new users, which it hasn't got in the past 12 months, growing with only 2 million monthly active users compared to the same period last year.
But I digress. Coming back to our main subject, the 140-character limit will be removed today for Android and iOS apps, on twitter.com, TweetDeck, and Twitter for Mac. In the coming days, it will be removed from the other apps and services as well.
