My Thoughts on Technology and Jamaica: @Twitter removes 140 character limit in DM – Group IM more like real conversations in Smartphone-Era

Saturday, June 13, 2015

@Twitter removes 140 character limit in DM – Group IM more like real conversations in Smartphone-Era

Twitter is really not taking the coming onslaught of IM (Instant Messaging) lying down.

Come Wednesday July 1st 2015, Twitter will remove the 140 character limit on sending DM (Direct Messages) as reported in the article “Twitter removes 140-character limit for direct messages”, published June 11, 2015 by Sarah Mitroff, CNET News

This News was announced on Twitter's Developer Blog in a Press release entitled “Removing the 140 character limit from Direct Messages”. This is an interesting development, as it comes two (2) month after Twitter had made it possible for complete strangers to send you DM back in April 2015 as noted in my blog article entitled “How to Send a DM to someone on @Twitter you are not following – Troll’s Joy is hanging by a Thread”.

Now they're removing the last vestige of the pre-smartphone era, when Twitter had launched. Back then, because a typical SMS allowed 160 characters, Twitter limited Tweets to 140 characters, with the remaining 20 used in the body of the SMS to send your Twitter handle.

Twitter removes 140 character limit in DM – Group IM more like real conversations in Smartphone-Era

Apparently, that policy was working fairly well, as very few persons seem to have an issue with anyone being able to send them DM.

Then again, very few Twitter users may have actually enabled the feature in the first place, preferring to play classic Video games in their Twitter feed as stated in my blog article entitled “Internet Archive’s Games playable within @Twitter – How to Embed MS-DOS Games in Twitter and kill Worker Productivity”, as they progressively work towards the Weekend!

Even if they have, they can easily delete the conversation thread to block the person from DM'ing them again. Even better, you can also mute them as a well, a feature that has existed since May 2014 as explained in my blog article entitled “How to mute someone on Twitter - To Block or to Mute for Silence of the Lambs as The Day the Earth Stood Still”.

Now that Twitter is doing away with this limitation, it'll also make Group IM, which Twitter had also introduce in November 2014 as reported in my blog article entitled “Twitter rolls out Group DM and 30 Second Vines - How TweetDeck's Scheduled Tweets now with Group DM is addictive”. 




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