Twitter Abandons 140-Character Limit For DMs

Twitter has stuck with its 140 character limit through thick and thin, it’s integral to the microblogging service so it’s safe to say that tweets aren’t going to be any longer than that at least for the foreseeable future.

For several naive years, those Twitter users most often subjected to unpoetical expressions of thirst via direct messages were somewhat comforted by the fact that such expressions were limited to 140 likely embarrassing characters. “If you can’t wait to try out longer Direct Messages, be sure you’re using the latest versions of our apps so you get the update right away”, the company said.

This represents a diverging of paths between the public-facing side of Twitter – the public tweets that still have a 140 character count – and private communications, which didn’t exactly encourage lengthy messages with the imposed limit.

This appetite for change is a general trend in the company, which has been undergoing a facelift in recent months.

Sending and receiving Direct Messages via the SMS service has still been kept within limits.

Mr Agarwal said the hope was to make Twitter feel more like a ” casual chatting platform”.

In doing so, Twitter isn’t just trying to make direct messaging more compelling at a time when messaging overall is dominated by Facebook Messenger, WeChat and WhatsApp – all of which report larger user bases than Twitter. “Where we see our advantage [over apps such as WhatsApp] is that there’s so much awesome content on Twitter already, that we want to enable people to have private conversations about those things”. Starting today, that limit has been lifted to 10,000 characters for direct messages. The increase will affect Twitter.com, iOS and Android mobile apps, TweetDeck, and Twitter for Mac.