Twitter Is Going Slack
New changes to the direct messaging system look familiar.
If this is the summer of Slack — and a $2.8 billion valuation pretty much proves it is — Twitter hasn’t missed the memo. The hard-to-monetize micro-messaging service announced Thursday that it will remove the 140 character limit in direct messages at some point in July. DMs will become a place for private chats to flow like wine.
Or like Slack conversations.
Public Twitter will still be the same old land of 140-character tweets and pictures of text getting around the 140-character limit, but direct messages are getting a complete overhaul. At the beginning of the year, Twitter announced group DMs. In April, Twitter tweaked its direct message settings to allow for non-followers to communicate in private. The end goal, it seems, is to crystallize into something that looks more like Whatsapp or Slack. Rather than thrusting one’s words into the great wide open of the current platform, Twitter will ferry them to interested parties.
Presumably Twitter will continue to also do Twitter stuff, but that doesn’t seem to be the company’s priority. Understandable enough: Twitter in 2015 looks a little greener around the gills. Bright-tailed and bushy-eyed about the future? That’s Twitter in 2009 — and Slack in 2015.
