Twitter CEO Dick Costolo stepping down isn’t the only big news from Twitter today — and this other piece of news promises have a much bigger impact on users, at least in the short term.
The company is planning to remove the 140-character limit on direct messages, allowing users to send messages that are up to 10,000 characters long. In a post on the company’s developer forums today, direct messages product manager Sachin Agarwal let developers know about the change so they could prepare their apps for the longer messages coming in July.
Previously, users were limited to the same 140 characters available in public tweets. This often created broken streams of thought in direct message conversations. Since posting multiple updates in a DM doesn’t clutter up the home feed, many people didn’t see a need for the 140 character limit.
However, that 140 character limit will still be around for standard tweets. While Twitter has made it easier to share photos, the company still focuses on short bursts for communication and has actually created new limits for users sharing links in recent years.
