Twitter lifts 140-characters limit for Direct Messages

BANGALORE, INDIA: If you’ve checked your Direct Messages(DM) today, you may have noticed that something’s missing: The limitation of 140 characters. You can now chat on in a single Direct Message, and exchange messages privately of up to 10,000 characters.

While Twitter is largely a public experience, DMs let you have private conversations about the memes, news, movements, and events that unfold on Twitter. This change is another big step towards making the private side of Twitter even more powerful and fun.

Twitter launched Group Direct Messages  in 2015, where multiple users could chat at once and any user could message another user privately irrespective of the fact that they might not be following each other.

The update will be rolled out to 100 percent of users worldwide, who use Twitter.com, TweetDeck and Twitter-owned-and-operated applications from iPhone, iPad, Mac and Android devices.

Mobile web users will be able to receive long DMs, but not send them.

SMS DMs are still limited. If a user sends an SMS DM longer than 140 characters, Twitter will split it into multiple messages. While the first message will be sent as a DM in such a case, the remaining characters will post as Tweets.