Twitter will soon let you send more than 140 characters via direct messages. In a post on Twitter’s Developer Forum, Sachin Agarwal said that come July, Twitter is removing 140-character limit, opening up DMs for longer conversations.
It’s unclear when exactly longer DMs will be launching, but they might be capped at 10,000 characters. Public tweets will remain limited to 140-characters.
Agarwal posted step-by-step instructions for developers who want to prepare their apps to handle more than 140-characters.
Twitter continues to make messaging more robust and efficient to use, from adding group direct messaging, to providing the option to make inboxes open to everyone, to reinstating the ability to send links in DM. Longer messages will make Twitter even more like a chat application.
With an increased emphasis on private messaging in recent months, Twitter is clearly trying to cater to the growing number of people who want to silo public and private conversations. I’m pretty excited to test out longer messages—there are a number of friends I know only via Twitter and we chat via DM regularly, with our messages broken up into 140-character snippets of conversation. It will be nice to remove that constant barrier between words.
As the growth of apps like Snapchat and the explosion of Facebook Messenger prove, private chat apps are just as important, if not more popular, than sharing snippets of your daily life with the world.
Illustration by Max Fleishman
