Twitter have made some pretty significant announcements today, including the departure of their CEO Dick Costolo. However, that doesn’t impact too much upon the enjoyment of Twitter on Android. The removal of the 140 character limit in direct messages, though, that’ll make a bit of a difference!
The announcement is clear in that the limit will be removed for direct messages only; the 140 character limit will remain for normal tweets… though with the removal for messages, one can only imagine it MAY be considered for public tweets in future, or at least the limit may be raised. Bear in mind, Twitter was conceived in a time when it was primarily used via text message, and the 140 character limit reflected the (then) limits on the size of SMS.
Given that this time has long since passed, and we’re in an age of images, videos and cat GIFs in tweets, increasing that 140 character limit might increase the usability of Twitter just a little bit further. Who knows.
The announcement comes alongside news for developers that the APIs will be opened up publicly soon to allow third-party app developers to take advantage of the new 10k limit for messages. 10k characters might be far too much for public tweets, but increasing the limit from 140 chars to 280, or 512 chars would be a good move.
Let’s see what Twitter does next.
