The social network is going to remove the 140-character limit on direct messages from next month. However, this won’t apply to public-facing tweets, with Twitter being very clear that no changes will be introduced for the main part of the service.

The change in direct messages was revealed by the company in advance in order to allow Twitter’s developer community update their third-party apps. Since July, the length of direct messages will be up to 10,000. In the meantime, Facebook Messenger has a character limit of 20,000.

Twitter’s representatives pointed out they have been taking steps to enhance direct messages over the past few months, and this change is not the last one, as the company has more ideas to implement. However, when talking about the public side of Twitter, this introduction doesn’t change anything – all tweets will continue to be 140 characters long.

It should be noted that attitude of the microblogging service to its direct messages has varied over its history. Direct messaging was all but abandoned for years, and many industry experts and ordinary users thought Twitter could remove it. The list of flaws included, for example, the cases where read counts failed to sync or reflect whether a message had been read at all; there were times when notifications were flaky, and users just missed messages because of it; finally, a bug in the spam detection feature didn’t allow users to send links in direct messages for more than a year, while the company claimed it was not a bug, but just an anti-spam feature.

Fortunately, towards the end of last year, internal direct messages deserved attention of the company. All abovementioned flaws were fixed, and Twitter announced new features in direct messaging, including the ability to send pictures, create and join group conversations, and receive messages from users who aren’t followers.