They warned us back in June that this day was coming. I was in denial. Surely, Twitter wouldn't. Couldn't.
Welp, they have.
Get ready for people to drop a book into your DMs, because Twitter has officially dropped the 140-character limit in direct messages. The brevity that we've enjoyed for so so long, that natural cutting off point…gone. Poof.
Your direct messages are about to look like a text message from a rambly drunk ex:
Rest assured, Twitter swears that the 140-character thing will remain for the of the service, but does refer to longer DMs as “more powerful and fun,” which says to me that the company has simply run out of words to describe things, because this is one of the most awful days in the history of days for my Twitter experience.
People are literally going to try and cram War and Peace into my DMs.
Here's what Twitter Product Manager, Sachin Agarwal, said about the rollout in a blog post today:
We'll begin rolling out this change today across our Android and iOS apps, on 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 out longer Direct Messages, be sure you're using the latest versions of our apps so you get the update right away.
Group DMs are going to become neverending scroll-city.
On a more serious note, this change does put the feature in parity with the likes of iMessage, Messenger, WhatsApp and every other messaging service on the planet. To me, though, the limit is what made the feature special. To the rest of the world, it's probably an annoyance, and Twitter needs less of “me's” and more of the “rest of the world's” pronto.
Perhaps Twitter is prepping for the launch of a standalone DM app and this was one of the last technical issues that stood in the way of doing absolutely amazing 3D animated stickers and things the likes of which we've never seen before.
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