If you’ve checked your Direct Messages today, you may have noticed that something’s missing: the limitation of 140 characters. You can now chat on (and on) in a single Direct Message, and likely still have some characters left over.

While Twitter is largely a public experience, Direct Messages allow users to have private conversations on the social media platform. To that end, Twitter has decided to rethink its word limit policy on the Direct Messages aspect of its platform, which is just one of a number of changes it has made in that area over the last few months. According to Twitter, "today's change is another big step towards making the private side of the social media platform even more powerful and fun."

You may be wondering what this means for the public side of Twitter. In a word, nothing. Tweets will continue to be the 140 characters as they are today.

Twitter will begin rolling out this change today across their Android and iOS apps, on twitter.com,  TweetDeck, as well as Twitter for Mac. It will continue to roll out worldwide over the next few weeks. As such, for those wishing to try out the longer Direct Messages, Twitter advises users to be sure that they are using the latest version of the platform on their respective OS'. Twitter also notes that sending and receiving Direct Messages via SMS will still be limited to 140 characters.