For reasons that I could never understand, Twitter’s Direct Message functionality was subject to the same character limit as a general tweet – all 140 of them.

But Twitter yesterday revealed that as part of a number of changes that the company will be implementing, it will be dropping the 140-character limit from July.

“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,” a Twitter staff member wrote on the company’s development blog.

But don’t get your hopes up if you thought that Twitter might be leaning towards the ability to tweet for longer than 140 characters.

“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,” it explained.

It does however, has some implications for developers, and Twitter suggested a number of actions in order to make sure that apps function perfectly when the change happens.

Some actions include reviewing the new API additions, update your GET requests, and update your UI to accommodate the longer messages.

[Image – CC by 2.0/Tom Raftery]