For the past few months, Twitter has been releasing new features that are geared towards increasing the time users spend on the apps. But a feature they are about to roll out will be a welcome change for most Twitter users: removing the 140 character limit from Direct Messages (DMs).

DMs will now be able to run on as long as you would like, and won't need to be annoyingly broken up into small bites. This will allow the DM portion of the app to operate much more like a typical chat/messaging service. Because the messages are private, Twitter feels that DMs don't need to follow the same format as tweets made on a users feed.

This change is expected to really help the businesses, large and small, who use twitter as a means of customer service. This will allow people to have a new and more convenient line of communication into a company.

Some of the other more recent roll-outs include the ability to share videos of up to 30 seconds in length, post URLs in DMs, and have DM group chats of up to 20 people.

These changes will give Twitter a strong grasp in the instant messaging industry, an area where Facebook Messenger currently reigns supreme. By this time next year, will we all be messaging through Twitter instead of Facebook? Or probably just both?...