I don’t often use exclamation points in the titles of articles (even when they’re about Yahoo), but this one felt warranted. Is there anything more annoying about Twitter’s usability than that blasted 140-character limit on DMs?

Well, maybe the inability to delete a tweet that includes a typo, but other than that, I think the DM limit takes the cake.

I get the limit for tweets. The service has always been about short, simple messages, and there are apps you can use if you must say more. There is also etiquette for sequential tweets. But I never understood why this limit had to apply to DMs. It’s a private conversation, and private conversations can rarely be had in less than 140 characters per person.

Finally, Twitter is doing away with this nonsense. Twitter’s Sachin Agarwal spilled the beans over in the company’s developer forums (via VentureBeat). He said:

We’ve done a lot to improve Direct Messages over the past year and have much more exciting work on the horizon. One change coming in July that we want to make you aware of now (and first!) is the removal of the 140 character limit in Direct Messages. In order to make this change as seamless as possible for you we’ve included some recommendations below to ensure all your applications and services can handle these longer format messages before we flip the switch.

We recommend taking the following actions in preparation:

Review the new API additions below.
Update your GET requests so you will be able to receive the full length of DM text.
Adjust your app UI to accommodate longer DM text.
We encourage you to test and deploy the above changes in advance, but you won’t be able to send longer DMs until we launch in July. In the coming weeks though, we will update this post to include directions on how to test these changes, as well as a more specific launch date.

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.

You hear that? July! That’s pretty soon. Private communication on Twitter is about to get a lot more enjoyable and a lot less annoying.

This is only the most recent in a handful of Twitter announcements regarding DMs. Less than two months ago, Twitter brought back a feature that lets people enable the ability for anyone to DM regardless of if they’re following that person. Additionally, Twitter added Group Message functionality earlier this year.

With private communication apps being so hot, Twitter is smart to improve its own such functionality anyway it can. So far in 2015 it’s making some good strides. Will the DM one day get its own app?

Image via Twitter