Twitter lets anyone broadcast their thoughts to the world… as long as they keep those thoughts to 140 characters at a time, or less. But starting in July you’ll be able to send Twitter messages that are longer… a lot longer.

Users will be able to compose messages up to 10,000 characters in length. There’s just one catch: you’ll only be able to send those longer messages as Direct Messages.

twitter dm

That means you can send a novella-length private message to another Twitter user, but if you want to broadcast longer messages to the public you’ll still need to chop them up into smaller chunks (or post a link to another website where people can read the full text).

Twitter’s 140 character limit initially made sense since one way to use the platform in its earliest days was to send Tweets via SMS. But as Twitter has grown up, people have come to use it in a variety of different ways. Now you can share pictures, videos, and even live-streaming video content.

Part of the platform’s appeal is the burst of short, headline-like messages which are easily digested more quickly than a typical Facebook or Google+ post. But direct messages are more like chat or email messages than broadcasts, so if Twitter was going to remove any character limits, it makes sense for the company to start with DMs.

via VentureBeat

Support Liliputing

Liliputing's primary sources of revenue are advertising and affiliate links (if you click the "Shop" button at the top of the page and buy something on Amazon, for example, we'll get a small commission).

But there are several ways you can support the site directly even if you're using an ad blocker* and hate online shopping.

Contribute to our Patreon campaign

or...

Contribute via PayPal

* If you are using an ad blocker like uBlock Origin and seeing a pop-up message at the bottom of the screen, we have a guide that may help you disable it.

Subscribe to Liliputing via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 9,547 other subscribers

One reply on “Twitter moves beyond 140 characters… at least for private messages”

Comments are closed.