Twitter lifts 140-character limit for direct messages

Twitter, on the other hand, has preferred to keep its direct messaging (DM) system within its main interface, while also imposing the same 140-character limit to DMs to maintain one of the website’s most popular identifying features.

The 140 character limit still applies to public posts, demonstrating the social network – or interest network as many of its employees prefer to call it – is not in favour of a complete overhaul to its offering.

With the change, Twitter might become a stronger competitor in an industry jam-packed with other messaging services like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat, Google Hangouts, and basic text messaging apps. If a user sends an SMS DM longer than 140 characters, Twitter will split it into multiple messages.

Last year, Twitter rolled out a plan to focus on Direct Messages to help complement the public aspect of its platform. Kind of weird to see Twitter abandon one of the things that differentiated itself, although just making the change to private DMs probably won’t have much impact on Twitter itself.

Twitter announced the change, but don’t expect it to come to public Twitter any time soon.

Sachin Agarwal, product manager at Twitter, made the announcement via a blog, however, not a tweet, in order to explain in detail what’s going on.

Unlike earlier, Twitter users can now chat on continously in a single Direct Message as the social media site has enhanced its capacity to 10,000 characters.

He added, “We’ll begin rolling out this change today across our Android and iOS apps, on twitter.com, TweetDeck, and Twitter for Mac”. The update will roll out to the rest of the world in a couple of weeks. Again, this changes nothing for tweets, they’ll continue to be capped at 140 characters.

Among the changes were features that allowed users to receive Direct Messages from anyone, even if you don’t follow them.