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Twitter DM Character Limit Increases, Changes For Public Tweets Up Next?

By Cheryl Phillips
Published on: 05:03 PST, Jun 14, 2015

Thanks to the folks at Twitter, the 140-character limit for direct messages will be increased starting in July. The announcement was posted on the popular social media site’s blog on Thursday, prompting speculation that the limit for public tweets would be next to change.

According to the Twitter blog, the limit for DMs will increase from 140-characters to 10,000 characters next month. However, the company has no plans to change the tweet limit in the near future, so extra-wordy users will still need to split up their tweets if they can’t get their point across in 140-characters or less.

“You may be wondering what this means for the public side of Twitter. Nothing! Tweets will continue to be the 140 characters they are today.”

While the public tweets won’t change, sending longer direct messages will be a welcome change to those who need to send their fellow tweeters more detailed information, a rant, or perhaps a few paragraphs from a book.

How much more will you be able to say when the DMs increase from 140 to 10,000 characters in July? If you think in terms of a single-spaced, typed document, it’s likely you won’t be able to text your entire college thesis to your best Twitter buddy, but you will be able to send an extra-long rant. According to the Word to Pages calculator, 10,000 characters equals roughly 22 pages of single-spaced text using a 12 point Arial font.

This isn’t the first change for those who like to keep things private by using Twitter direct messaging. According to CBC News, a group messaging feature was added in January. Group messaging allows users to add up to 20 people to a DM thread, something that was previously limited to an interaction between two people.

Another change came in April, when Twitter introduced the ability to receive a DM from both accounts they follow, and those they don’t. Prior to April, users could only receive or send direct messages if both users followed each other.

How does the Twitter community feel about the upcoming increase to the direct messaging character limit? The feedback is mixed, with a good dose of humor thrown in.

Are you looking forward to being able to send wordier direct messages on Twitter next month, or do you just send an email when you have a lot to say?

[Image: Focus News]

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