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Removing the 140-character limit from Direct Messages
- spike021 11y agoYesterday I was trying to schedule an AMA for a subreddit I'm a part of.. I needed to keep sending pieces of my message over multiple DM's since this limit still existed at the time. Painful.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- spike021 11y agoOh, not really trying to brag. It's just a minor league baseball player. Point is scheduling something like that means figuring out best timing for both our schedules, etc.
- cryowaffle 11y agoYea that guy was wierd, I didn't get any sense that you were bragging.
- spike021 11y agoOh well. No big deal.
- stevesearer 11y agoAt the risk of sounding out of touch, was there some reason an email couldn't have been sent? I regularly use DMs on twitter, though when I know a message will be longer I just take it to a medium made for a conversation or longer messages.
- spike021 11y agoOh, I definitely would've preferred email. I probably could have asked but I didn't think about it. I figured we were already having a brief conversation over DM, we could just continue with that.
- mahouse 11y agoIn my opinion this is a bad precedent. Call it a non sequitur but what if they eventually decide they want to remove the 140-character limit from tweets? I mean, the thing I liked the most of Twitter was how simple it was, but they have started adding so many things to it (especially GIFs, Twitter Cards and videos that auto-play) that it will eventually be Facebook! And yes I am very concerned of something like that because Twitter is my social network of choice since 2008 for a reason!
- ProAm 11y agoI think they are going to eventually drop the limit for tweets and rebrand into a mico-blogging platform with a built in user base.. There will still be a character limit probably in the mid hundreds, but it will help them monetize.
- ryanSrich 11y agoI don't use tumblr but someone told me that tubmlr is very similar to what you just described (sans the char limit) - from your point of view, why would twitter do this?
- rm_-rf_slash 11y agoLet's say photos and links were separate attachments. That way you could say just as much without having to compensate for the URL, even if it was condensed.
- kachnuv_ocasek 11y agoIf they do, I (and I believe at least a dozen other people) will seriously consider terminating my presence on Twitter. I'm mostly a passive user anyway, and the recent (well, 2-3 years time frame) changes, such as moving pictures and "sponsored tweets" have been quite annoying. The forced conciseness of the tweets is the only thing that keeps me from pushing the button. Now, I know I sound like a grumpy old cat, but when some things change, they eventually end up being nothing like the original. Just compare that with Reddit or Hacker News, for instance. The basic laws (and even visuals, in the case of HN) have been the same for some years now, yet the community is thriving.
- calbear81 11y agoFinally, so many companies do customer support via Twitter and ask folks to DM them the details and you're limited to describing what help you need in 140-characters.
- hn9780470248775 11y agoBut the enforced brevity (in the form of a 140-character limit) is probably precisely why this works. Otherwise the same companies would be doing support over email.
- calbear81 11y agoActually, people go onto Twitter to complain because it's a very public forum. It's a terrible shame that in order to get some service now-a-days you have to basically publicly shame them or find some way of getting their CEO's private email.
- tedmiston 11y agoIt's also easier to find a company's twitter handle than the correct support email address (if they even expose one without requiring you to sign into an account or fill out a form).
- daigoba66 11y agoWhat's wrong with email?
- tikhonj 11y agoThere are two questions there: what's wrong with email for Twitter and what's wrong with email for users. The first is easy: they don't control it. Twitter handles are already a broad system of public identities and Twitter wants to double down on that. The second is harder. The value proposition—if any—comes from letting people stay within a single service. It lowers the barrier to starting a conversation on Twitter since you don't need the song and dance of exchanging emails first. It also helps people keep their public identity consistent, especially for those who (for whatever reason) treat their email address as semi-private. Is this enough to make people use Twitter messages more? I think so, especially on the first point. If you make something easier, people are more likely to use it. I doubt it will replace email to any great extent, but rather lead to out-of-band conversations that wouldn't have happened otherwise. We'll have to wait and see.
- e12e 11y agoInteresting - you thouch upon one reason why twitter without lenght limits will be different from facebook: an acceptance of pseudonyms and multiple accounts that are actuallly separate. Still a privatly owned, centralised panopticon.
- hueving 11y agoit doesn't have a monetization strategy and it doesn't rely on a modern single-page web interface. also, it has a low barrier to entry so any old chump can run an email server. these are all bad things now
- Retra 11y agoThose aren't bad things. Those are great things. If you feel that this kind of functionality needs to be added to email, then you're probably making a completely redundant product. Reinventing a shittier, proprietary wheel.
- danso 11y agoFive or six years ago, I was surprised (and a little annoyed) when someone asked me to shoot him a DM because he never checks his email. So I guess this will make conversation via DM more productive? Or will DMs just become the new email, in terms of the same cognitive burden?
- braythwayt 11y agoI don't know if this matters to you personally, but the thing about Twitter DMs (and about FB messages, I suppose) is that there is whitelisting by default: If you aren't following me, I can't spam your inbox. That is a very substantial difference for many people, and why they will use FB messenger, Twitter, or other services in lieu of mail.
- danso 11y agoThis is true...and on Twitter, I've "whitelisted" a lot of people I am not close enough at all to have them in my phonebook. And with Twitter, you have at least some assurance (in the same way that Airbnb gives you a bit more assurance than Craigslist) that you're contacting your intended person...whereas with email, a search can reveal several emails for a person, nevermind several similarly named people, each with several addresses.
- msie 11y agoChat apps are very popular. This lets Twitter get a piece of that action. Coming soon: emoji packs for DMs!!!
- rocky1138 11y agoI hate it when people DM me. I never check them, on purpose. Like voicemails on my cell, I've been looking for a way to completely disable that functionality.
- rocky1138 11y agoComically, as soon as the animated GIF showed the person's response, I closed the tab because I didn't want to read all of it. That was the whole point of the short messaging service of Twitter.
- drinchev 11y agoNice. I haven't heard of Twitter product changes since ages. I don't use DM's that much, but it looks like a logical choice.
- kevinSuttle 11y agoI can see this occasionally being useful for not wanting to switch context. I'd rather have the ability to edit tweets, though.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- justinmolineaux 11y agoThis tiny change could completely transform Twitter. My most-maintained professional relationships exist on Twitter, yet my non-public conversations (and the attention I pay to them) have nearly always been forced to other venues due to the DM character limit. In my mind, Twitter is now an equally-good alternative to SMS, FB Messenger, etc. You can bet I'll be DM-ing more and SMS-ing less because of it. Thank you Twitter.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- hellbanner 11y agoYou can click their profile to learn they are not.
- baddox 11y agoThat's an interesting perspective. I don't use Twitter for DMing, but for the services I do use to DM (mostly SMS/iMessage and Facebook) I find that I rarely (if ever) get close to 140 characters. Yet I do find the 140 character limit for public tweets annoying on a regular basis. I realize that's supposedly a fundamental part of Twitter's brand or niche, but I'd much rather see them remove the character limit for public tweets.
- justinmolineaux 11y agoThanks! That's interesting too - lifting the public tweet limit would also fundamentally change Twitter. As an author of tweets, I think I'd like it. I think @byuu mentioned it would promote intelligent discourse on important subjects - I agree. As a reader though, I don't want to lose the high-bandwidth nature of Twitter. The headline thought/status/caption in your stream, with a link to the details hits an information consumption optimum for me. It's really that first DM in a conversation where I think 140 characters causes me to leave Twitter. Maybe I'm doing it wrong - often trying to stuff salutation + context + question into the first DM. If the convo gets past that, then yeah, 140 is fine.
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- mceoin 11y agoThis is what innovation looks like.
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- pcsanwald 11y agoI've always assumed that maintaining the 140 character limit is a marketing decision, and they've long since removed any technical limitations that keeps tweets to 140 characters. Does anyone know if I am correct?
- harryh 11y agoYou are not correct.
- unabridged 11y agoIs anyone else bothered by the name DM or "direct message"? For the rest of the internet the standard name has been PM for private message or personal message.
- spacehome 11y agoDM means dungeon master. Now get off my lawn.
- staunch 11y agoReally should let us roll to see if we have to get off your lawn.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- kolev 11y agoWhen you say "I PM'd you", it's not clear, so, I think, Twitter, by choosing their own term, it uniquely specifies the communication channel, i.e. you can PM via different channels (like Facebook, etc.), but you can DM only via Twitter.
- Mz 11y agoYay! I do not spend much time on twitter, but my DM discussions almost always involve breaking up a communique into several short messages to get past the character limit. I have a friend who chooses to only contact me via twitter, usually privately, and the limit has been a real nuisance. I am so happy to see this.
- mtgx 11y agoAre they going to add end-to-end encryption back in, though? http://www.theverge.com/2014/3/19/5523656/twitter-gives-up-on-encrypting-direct-messages-at-least-for-now http://www.theverge.com/2014/3/19/5523656/twitter-gives-up-o...
- barnacs 11y agoNow people will have to live with n+1 independent, closed messaging platforms for private messaging. Thank you, Twitter.
- themodelplumber 11y agoReminded me of MSN Messenger, AIM, Yahoo, ICQ...in 20 years from today I guess we'll have yet another string of service names dominating our signatures and about-me's.
- wslh 11y agoI am a "little bit" sad this trivial thing is wasting our neurons and general attention. I would love to see the commit that made this possible. It reminds me when Apple revolutionized the world adding copy&paste to iOS.
- sib 11y agoIn all seriousness, copy & paste in iOS is way more useful than this!
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- mweibel 11y agoI'm quite sure that this, what you call trivial thing, requires more than a single commit.. Might need some non-trivial data changes in the backend before actually removing the frontend limit.
- wslh 11y ago- limit = 140 + limit = 16384
- tonetheman 11y agoIf I only knew how to direct message this would apply to me.
- andrejewski 11y agoLast winter I built an application called Subtweet that built on top of Twitter's Direct Message service, using Twitter's API as much as I could to reduce overhead. It is bittersweet that Twitter is improving DM as it makes Subtweet more and more unnecessary to users, but I am so happy to have all of these features built right in. I saw this shift coming when Twitter added multi-user DMing so I had already written the post mortem if anyone is interested. http://subtweet.co/ http://subtweet.co/ http://chrisandrejewski.com/2015/02/07/subtweet-postmortem.html http://chrisandrejewski.com/2015/02/07/subtweet-postmortem.h...
- jchomali 11y agoThis could be great for some king of things but maybe annoying because of spammers
- janvdberg 11y agoFinally some changes for the better! The charm and success of Twitter is probably partly because it is a dead simple concept. But I still wish they add more new features: http://piks.nl/wordpress/if-i-were-the-ceo-of-twitter/ http://piks.nl/wordpress/if-i-were-the-ceo-of-twitter/
- mninm 11y agoAs long as they are changing stuff I'd like to see Twitter move from counting the total number of characters in a @username to having them count instead as only a small fixed number (say 2 characters) in a similar fashion to how URLs no matter how long or short count as 22 characters. This would put all users on an equal footing and could potentially decrease the number of hacking attempts on those accounts with the shortest usernames (which is apparently a problem).
- sgustard 11y agoNever before has an ALTER TABLE CHANGE COLUMN generated so much hysteria.
- spudlyo 11y agoHaha, I'm pretty sure tweets and DMs have been recently moved out of MySQL, although AFAIK the social graph is still there.
- skeletonjelly 11y agoWhat a tense x minutes that would have been...
- Perseids 11y ago"Today’s change is another big step towards making the private side of Twitter even more powerful and fun." Calling the ability to send arbitrary long messages "powerful", when virtually every other internet messaging service has allowed this for ages, requires some serious marketing reality distortion.
- darkstalker 11y agoSo we'll be able to use Twitter DMs as data storage?