Twitter has officially dropped the 140-character limit …
On Direct Messages. Now, you can ramble to your heart’s desire when sending private messages to another Twitter user. Twitter said it would be doing this a couple of months ago, and today the update is rolling out to iOS, Android, Tweetdeck, and twitter.com.
The new limit is 10,000 characters, which isn’t really as many as you think (Facebook Messenger’s limit is double that), but it’s probably sufficient in most cases.
“While Twitter is largely a public experience, Direct Messages let you have private conversations about the memes, news, movements, and events that unfold on Twitter. Each of the hundreds of millions of Tweets sent across Twitter every day is an opportunity for you to spark a conversation about what’s happening in your world. That’s why we’ve made a number of changes to Direct Messages over the last few months. Today’s change is another big step towards making the private side of Twitter even more powerful and fun.”
Direct Messages now go beyond 140 characters. Go long, express yourself, wax poetic: https://t.co/zr2lnTfOI7 pic.twitter.com/o4eSv6Wv5u
— Twitter (@twitter) August 12, 2015
Honestly, character limits for DMs was always kind of ridiculous. Limits on public tweets? Sure, that’s what Twitter is. Changing that would change the core of the service.
But limiting direct messages was dumb. If Twitter wants people to use it as a true messaging app (which it clearly does), this had to happen.