Twitter Inc. may be testing a new feature that will make it easier for users to bombard their followers with long strings of tweets. Matt Navarra, Director of Social Media for The Next Web, tweeted a screenshot on Sunday that showed a secret feature that allows users to send long messages divided into multiple tweets.

There have been rumors for years that Twitter might eventually drop its 140-character limit to better compete with the likes of Facebook Inc., but so far, the popular microblog has stuck with the limit. Users have done their best to get around Twitter’s limit using so-called “tweetstorms,” where one long message is split into multiple bite-sized chunks. The new tweetstorm feature that is reportedly being tested by Twitter would make this process easier by allowing users to type out their whole message at once, and then automatically split it into multiple tweets.

According to Navarra, the feature was discovered by an Android app developer who uses the pseudonym Devesh Logendran. Navarra added in another tweet that the feature is “hidden and not activated yet.”

A Twitter spokesperson said that the company has “no comment to share on the record” regarding the tweetstorm feature, but even if Twitter is secretly testing the feature out, there is still a good chance that it will never see the light of day. Twitter frequently tests new features, many of which never make it to the app itself, and not everyone is a fan of tweetstorms in the first place. They can be confusing to parse for many users, who might see a message retweeted out of order and without its original context.

With Twitter’s ongoing efforts to make its platform more streamlined and easy to pick up for new users, the feature might be too clunky in the end, but it does show that Twitter is still looking for ways to hold on to its 140 character limit while still introducing ways for users to post more long form content.

While Twitter may or may not add a native tweetstorm feature in the future, there are already several third-party apps that allow users to compose longer messages and then divide them into several ordered tweets. For example, apps like WriteRack and Storm It both allow users to write out their full text and then automatically distribute it in a string of tweets.

Photo: Esten Hurtle (@esten) for Twitter, Inc.