Two months into the announcement that it would remove the archaic 140-character limit from Direct Messages, Twitter today officially made the move in the hope of taking on popular instant messaging platforms like Facebook Messenger, Skype, iMessage and others.
For people who use Direct Messages to communicate with their Twitter followers privately, this change couldn’t have come sooner because they can now chat on in a single Direct Message without restrictions and “likely still have some characters left over.”
Where does this change take place?
The removal of the 140-character limit from Direct Messages will begin rolling out today across Twitter’s mobile apps for iOS and Android, the web interface over at twitter.com and in apps like TweetDeck and Twitter for Mac. “Sending and receiving Direct Messages via SMS will still be limited,” Twitter cautioned.
Make sure to update the aforesaid apps to the latest version to take advantage of Twitter’s direct messaging feature without limitations. Not everyone will see the 140-character limit removed from Direct Messages as the change “will continue to roll out worldwide over the next few weeks.”
What about tweets?
Nothing, as this change only affects Direct Messages and not the public side of Twitter. Your tweets will continue to be the 140 characters they are today until, of course, top dogs at Twitter decide it’s high time that limit went away as well.
Update time!
As mentioned before, update to the most recent version of Twitter’s apps if you haven’t already in order to make sure you can take advantage of the messaging changes and enjoy unrestricted conversations.
As you may have heard, Twitter four months ago introduced an optional feature allowing everyone to send you Direct Messages, whether they follow you or not. I just hope companies I follow won’t leverage these new features to spam my Twitter inbox with full on press releases.
Twitter’s iPhone and iPad application is available free in the App Store.
Twitter for Mac is a free download from the Mac App Store.
As for the cross-platform TweetDeck app, you can download the Mac edition in the Mac App Store at no charge or check out their finely done web app that runs in a browser.
Source: Twitter