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On August 12 Twitter announced something special: Starting immediately, Direct Messages on Twitter (DMs) will not be subject to Twitter’s 140 character limit anymore.

In case anyone is confused: This change applies only to Direct Messages, Twitter’s internal private messaging system. It does not apply to normal Tweets, which are still limited to 140 characters.

Long DMs on Twitter.com

However, this change is still very noteworthy. The 140 character limit is Twitter’s DNA. Ask anyone who ever used the internet and my guess is that the answer to the question “What’s Twitter?” will be along the lines of: “That’s the social network that limits everything to 140 characters.”

Messing with a companies DNA can be dangerous. Some time ago in the 80s Coca Cola tried to change the taste of Coke to “New Coke” and burnt billions of Dollars before reverting to “Classic Coke” after just a few month because people simply weren’t buying the updated soft drink. So why does Twitter think it’s a good idea to mess with their secret DNA?

Why Mess With The 140 Character Limit?

It’s a war out there between the biggest social networks, a war that is not fought with weapons, but with features and ease of use for certain usecases. Facebook is the general purpose network – most features and usable for almost anything. LinkedIn wants to be your business assistant and it’s defining feature is still the replacement of business cards in the modern world.

Twitter is the network with the 140 character limit that is still very hard to explain.

140 characters for a Tweet makes Twitter that charming straight to the point news, buzz and info network that it is today. But 140 characters also means that Twitter is limited in options. There is only so much that can be said in 140 characters – and even if Twitter added pictures and video options to Tweets, well, if Twitter’s beauty lies in it’s simplicity, it’s limits do as well.

Twitter needs to find ways out of it’s own limitations – because if they don’t, they are limiting their own potential. They need to find opportunities to expand.

Which is what they did with opening up DMs to more than 140 characters.

If the limitation of Tweets to 140 characters makes absolute sense and is a thing of beauty – limiting messages to 140 characters makes absolutely no sense at all. If I think back, I remember numerous times when I spent ages trying to think up messages that included “Hello” and “Thank you” while asking for something specific, and I always ended up sending multiple messages. For direct communication with people in a more personal way you might want to go a little more in depth than the usual Twitter chit chat, and for that you would probably rather use Facebook than Twitter. Or email. Or Skype. What’s App even. The options are endless.

So, removing the limit from DMs only makes Twitter a much better communications tool while still keeping enough of it’s own DNA in place to not lose it’s fans.

So – is everything going well in Twitter land? Not everything, at least not yet.

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Problems with Removing the DM Limit

Tweetdeck with DMs

Unlike skype or even Facebook, Twitter is not just an app or even a website with a few official apps attached to it. One of Twitters greatest strength is that it is a platform. Much like IOS or Android are platforms.

There are numerous 3rd party apps closely attached to Twitter, things like Buffer, Unfollowers.com, Manageflitter and literally hundreds of others. There are numerous 3rd party Twitter clients as well that do nothing else but present Twitter’s main functionality in a different user interface and/or on devices it would otherwise not be available on.

That is currently a problem – because an extreme change like this needs time to be supported by all apps. It’s now been a week since Twitter publicly introduced the change – of course http://twitter.com rolled out the functionality first.

Also Twitter’s own Desktop + Web App called Tweetdeck already supports the feature to it’s full extend.

But not even every official Twitter client has already adapted to the change: I tested the newest version of the Android Twitter client on my BlackBerry Passport and it does display the incoming long form messages correctly – however, sending DMs is still limited to 140 characters. Which is a dealbreaker for me. I don’t know about iOS – I don’t own an iPhone or iPad.

(For those of you who are going to say that BlackBerrys don’t run Android – true. They do however support Android Apps quite well.)

The native official BlackBerry Twitter client doesn’t even support displaying the complete incoming messages, instead of cutting them off and showing a link to the complete message. Same goes for an unofficial Twitter client called Twittly that I use.

Other Twitter-based applications seem to have adapted well. The Social Media Automation tool SocialOomph seems to have adapted quickly, offering users to compose automatic DMs with 10,000 characters.

I haven’t tested StatusBrew yet – but it may well support it as well.

As of now, it seems that Twitter has still a couple of weeks if not month to work on the rollout of the feature before it will have reached a point where it is actually useful for a majority of their users.

The Marketing Perspective

It is still to early to say how this feature will affect marketing on Twitter. As you can see above from my quick and non representative research on Twitter tools, the automation platforms seem to be the quickest 3rd party providers to implement the feature.

There is definitely a chance for marketers here: Long form DMs offer the chance to send in depth info instead of short promotional auto DMs which tend to annoy the recipients. Early adopters may also have the chance to stand out from the crowd. But…

Currently 99% of marketing auto DMs are basically promotional crap for shitty products no one wants. Giving these marketers a tool that does allow them to send long form messages (simply consisting of more crap) holds the danger of breaking the whole DM system. Currently, these messages get accepted and ignored mostly because they are short and can be skimmed over quickly – if they appear in long messages they will make the system unusable in the long run.

I doubt Twitter wants to remove automation completely from its platform – but if it turns out that too much long form spam messages are being sent, this will lead to a point where Twitter will need to take action.

This is about what may happen, and I am not sure it will – but the danger is there.

Final Words

This is one of those moments when the Social Media industry shows that it is still young and moving quickly. This is what makes working in social media so exciting: Even thngs we thought to be set in stone (like the 140 character limit) can simply change in the blink of an eye. And with that horizons and opportunities can present themselves that some of us couldn’t even imagine in their wildest dreams.

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