In what's only one of Twitter's many updates this week, the platform announced that it will be increasing Direct Message character count from 140 to---get ready for this---10,000. That's right: The humble, minimalist, to-the-point DM is moving on up to the messaging big leagues.
To give you an idea of how massive that is: A seven-page longread I'm currently working on in Google Docs is 13,445 characters. It's so long I can't even remember what the beginning said. You could fit a short novel in a DM. In fact, the short story "The Little Match Girl" is much, much shorter than that. Paul Ford's "What Is Code?" is shorter than that (ha ha, no, it's not).
The point is: the DM just became a legitimate messaging application. Before, the short-form private chat was useful, but incredibly limited: You might ping a friend, but if the conversation evolved into anything more significant than swapping links or quick comments, you'd move to email, or iMessage, WhatsApp, or (gasp!) Facebook's Messenger. The delightful group DM is another great use of the feature, though it's much more of a quick roundtable than a real multi-person conversation.
Until now, DMs were quick chatter, like Twitter itself in many ways. Brevity has always been an essential part of Twitter, but the confines of a 140-character tweet expand with the context and rolling conversation of Twitter. Not so with DMs. Anyone who's tried to stick out a real conversation in a DM knows the utter pain of stilted responses that come from continually hitting enter, enter, enter. It's these things that bumped us out elsewhere once we hit the limits of the DM, and Twitter is having no more of it---because it can't afford to.
Messaging has become the essential feature of the social web, if not the sole feature (look no further than WhatsApp, Line, Kik, or Messenger, which now boasts a bevy of in-app features like payment and games.) Competing for our mobile minutes is essential, and despite the new and innovative things we can do with our phones, we---surprise!---still love using them to communicate. And often, we have more to say than 140 characters. Twitter hasn't had a dog in that particular fight until now; public communication? Sure. Private? Not so much. A standalone DM app feels like it's moments away from launching. (Which, it might be.)
At its core, Twitter is making a "stay here---why leave?!" play, something Facebook knows all too well. You don't have to go anywhere else to have a long conversation on Twitter anymore. Of course, you could argue that undoes some of what makes Twitter Twitter---but in reality, we introduced long, rambling conversations to Twitter a long time ago. Reply threads (canoes!) that go on for hours (days even), tweetstorms that dominate your stream. Sure, we might complain about these, but they're functional, something a lengthy DM wasn't. Until now.
