Direct messages on Twitter will soon allow for lengthy conversations between users. In July, Twitter's direct messages will have a 10,000 character limit per message instead of the current 140 character limit, Venture Beat reported.

Twitter announced on its developer blog Thursday that it would be expanding the character limit on direct messages. These are the private messages that users can send to each other through the Twitter service.

Direct messages have been a feature included with Twitter for a long time, but most users chose to send public tweets to their followers instead. Seeing the success and competition from Facebook, WhatsApp and other messaging services, Twitter wanted to make messaging more of a focus, CNet reports.

Twitter has made some recent changes to direct messages. Earlier this year, Twitter added group direct messages that allowed multiple users to discuss a tweet in a private setting. Twitter also started allowing direct messages to be sent by any user, even if they did not follow the other person. In the past, in order to send direct messages, the two users had to follow each other.

Users who do not want to receive messages from people they do not know or follow will be able to go into their settings and uncheck the "Receive Direct Messages from anyone" box.

Tweets will still have the 140-character limit. This limit was created when many users would send tweets by texting. Text messages had a limit of 160 characters; 20 characters were reserved for the user name and 140 characters were reserved for the tweet. With better technology and smartphones, that 160 character limit is no longer required for sending text messages. Still, Twitter decided to keep the limit for each tweet at 140 characters to keep users sending short messages.

With the expansion of direct messages, Twitter might be planning to release its own messenger one day. For now, users will have to use the direct messaging features from the Twitter website or app.