Direct messages on Twitter can now be much more long-winded. The company announced that starting today, it is dropping the 140-character limit for private messages within its network. The new limit is 10,000 characters.
Twitter said the change will begin rolling out today on twitter.com, the iOS and Android apps, TweetDeck and Twitter for Mac and will continue to roll out worldwide in the next few weeks. Direct Messages sent and received the old-school way via SMS will still be limited to 140 characters.
Here’s our original story from June when Twitter announced it would be making the change:
Twitter will no longer limit direct messages to 140 characters.
Starting in July, the maximum length of DMs — Twitter’s private messaging feature — will be boosted to 10,000 characters. The company announced the change in a post in its developers forum and a tweet by DM product manager Sachin Agarwal:
We're removing the 140 character limit in DMs this July. If you are a developer, check out API documentation here: https://t.co/G5I3LmxLG6 — Sachin Agarwal (@agarwal) June 11, 2015
Public tweets — and tweets from private accounts — will continue to be limited to the 140-character standard.
No exact date was announced for next month’s switchover, which should be a welcome change for brands that use Twitter as a customer service tool. Currently, the back-and-forth discussion between customer and business via DM is often cumbersome, requiring people to split their conversation into a series of messages. After the change, people will have plenty of space to explain their issues.
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