Sachin Agarwal, writing on Twitter’s weblog:

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. […]

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 they are today, rich with commentary as well as photos, videos, links, Vines, gifs, and emoji.

I don’t expect Twitter to change the 140-character limit in public tweets any time soon, but I hope they’re always able to resist the urge. One of the most wonderful things about Twitter is its most basic limitation, it allows timelines to be easily skimable and forces users to be as concise as possible.