Twitter Kills the 140 Character Limit for Direct Messages

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One of the defining qualities of Twitter is its constraint. The company’s website and apps are part social network and part publishing platform, but no matter what anyone uses the service for, everyone has 140 characters to get their thoughts out. This limit has even applied to private exchanges between Twitter users, until today. Now Twitter is doing away with limits for what are known as direct messages—DMs for short.
Starting in July, direct messages will no longer have a 140-character limit. Sachin Agarwal, Twitter’s product manager for direct messages, announced the change on the company’s developer website Thursday afternoon, about an hour before its embattled CEO, Dick Costolo, stepped down. (Co-founder and Chairman Jack Dorsey is filling in as interim CEO.)
Does this signify future changes for the length of public tweets? “You may be wondering what this means for the public side of Twitter. Nothing! Tweets will continue to be the 140 characters they are today,” Agarwal wrote.
The change to DMs come as Twitter is under fire on several fronts, including a clunky UI and a perception it has done too little to weed out trolls. Earlier in the week, Twitter introduced a new feature that lets users share their block lists with one another. Twitter users can create lists of users they don’t want to interact with. When a user adds someone to a block list, the blocked person cannot see their tweets or view their profile. Twitter said it’s allowing users to share block lists to make using the service safer for “people in your community facing similar issues,” such as harassment or bullying. Those who import another user’s block lists into their own user profile will automatically block the list’s multiple accounts all at once.