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 starting today 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 rambling drunk ex:

Twitter swears that the 140-character thing will remain a mainstay for the rest 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. Time to close up those DMs from anyone. People are going to try to cram War and Peace into my DMs.
Here’s what Twitter Product Manager Sachin Agarwal said about the rollout in a blog post today:
At least Twitter for Mac will get updated, which hasn’t happened since last October.
But mannnnnn….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 “me” and more of the “rest of the world” 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.
Ugh. I’m trying here. At least it’s not an edit button for tweets.
Can’t wait for the first drunken bloated wordy (up to 10,000 characters!) slide into my DMs:

I’d be happier with working animated GIFs in direct messages.
