UPDATE: Please look at the date of this post. The information here is out of date and will become more out of date as time goes by. Twitter have addressed some of the issues I mention here, but the post will stay up and the DM cleaner tool still works.

Direct messaging is one of Twitter’s weakest features. On a platform that is fundamentally about public conversation, this is a one-to-one private messaging system – except it isn’t private – it’s just direct. The new Twitter has improved the messaging interface, but this is only superficial improvement; DMs are a flawed feature at a much lower level.

In descending order of interestingness and importance, here are a few things you may not know about Twitter DMs.

1. All third party applications you authorize can read your DMs *
2. Deleting a DM you’ve sent or received also deletes it from the other person’s account;
3. Deleting DMs sends some Twitter clients into a confused frenzy;
4. DMs don’t have a ‘reply to’ ID, so they can’t be threaded properly;
5. The new Twitter interface only loads your most recent 100 messages;
6. I’ve written a tool for backing up and deleting all your DMs – imaginatively titled DM Cleaner.

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