For the first time on Twitter, people will be able to send messages that are longer than 140 characters. While tweets will still be restricted to the 140-character limit, Direct Messages (DMs) will be capped at 10,000 characters. These are the personal communications sent from one person to another. Twitter's Product Manager Sachin Agarwal blogged about the change. He wrote: "You can now chat on and on in a single Direct Message and likely still have some characters left over." He added: "While Twitter is largely a public experience, Direct Messages let you have private conversations....Tweets…are an opportunity for you to spark a conversation about what's happening in your world."

 

Twitter users will experience the change over the next few weeks as Twitter rolls out the new system worldwide on a country-by-country basis. The site's co-founder Jack Dorsey recently admitted Twitter needed to do better to keep up with its social networking competitors. Twitter currently has about 300 million global users while rival Facebook has more than 1.4 billion. Sites like Facebook and WhatsApp have spent a lot of money on making their messaging services more user-friendly. Twitter has had a similar focus throughout this year. It recently allowed group DMs and allowed people to accept private messages from people even if they do not follow them.