The 140 character limit has been one of Twitter’s most redeeming and at the same time most infuriating features. It defined Twitter not as an ordinary social media platform, but rather as a microblog, one where we could share snippets of our doings without generating the same amount of annoyance those same snippets would receive on Facebook. No I don’t care for a status update from you every two minutes on Facebook but if you tweet ten times in two minutes on Twitter, I’ll give you a pass.
The 140 character limit cut out the fat people would adorn statuses with, trimming posts so that they were to the point. Often though people would disregard the simplicity of Twitter and instead splurge, tweeting every few seconds, often with singular words that could have fit in one single, concise tweet.
The odd thing about Twitter, I felt, was that the 140 character limit not only applied to public tweets but to private “direct messages” as well. Unlike public tweets, direct messages were only seen by the person you sent them to and the character limit often had me chopping up lengthy messages into 140 character segments. As a result I was often forced to send a person I wished to speak to in private a WhatsApp message or a Facebook Message. It seems Twitter has caught on with the fact that 140 character limited DMs, as they’re often abbreviated to, doesn’t make sense.
In a blog post, Sachin Agarwal wrote:
“While Twitter is largely a public experience, Direct Messages let you have private conversations about the memes, news, movements, and events that unfold on Twitter. 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 your world. That’s why we’ve made a number of changes to Direct Messages over the last few months. Today’s change is another big step towards making the private side of Twitter even more powerful and fun.”
The update will begin rolling out to Android and Apple devices, on Twitter.com, TweetDeck and Twitter for Mac from today, though of course you can update your preferred app straight away if you don’t like waiting for it.
