Good news, Twitter users. Your Direct Messages are no longer limited to 140 characters.
As expected, Twitter on Wednesday officially dropped the 140-chacracter Direct Message limit. The new DM limit is 10,000 characters, so you should have more than enough room to say what you need to get out — unless you're really long-winded.
"You can now chat on (and on) in a single Direct Message, and likely still have some characters left over," Twitter Product Manager Sachin Agarwal wrote in a blog post. "While Twitter is largely a public experience, Direct Messages let you have private conversations... Each of the hundreds of millions of Tweets sent across Twitter every day is an opportunity for you to spark a conversation about what's happening in your world."
The change is rolling out now across Twitter's iOS and Android apps, as well as Twitter.com, TweetDeck, and Twitter for Mac. It will continue to roll out worldwide over the next few weeks. If you can't wait to try it out, just head over to the App Store or Google Play to download the latest version of Twitter's app.
Twitter this year introduced several other tweaks for the DM feature, including group DMs and the ability to accept private messages from anyone — even if you don't follow that person.
"Today's change is another big step towards making the private side of Twitter even more powerful and fun," Agarwal said.
Note that this will not affect the public side of Twitter. Tweets are still limited to 140 characters.
Meanwhile, Twitter also this week rolled out a new feature that lets customers of social-tracking service Gnip peruse all public tweets going back nine years. The new Full-Archive Search API, aimed at businesses, would, for instance, let a company analyze previous launch conversations ahead of a new product debut or explore Twitter activity when responding to customer service inquiries.