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Twitter contemplating 10,000-character limit for tweets
06 Jan 2016
  • Twitter is building a new feature that will allow users to post tweets as long as 10,000 characters, well beyond its current 140-character limit, technology news website Re/code reported.

  • An expansion of the limit to 10,000 characters would allow a tweet of more than 1,000 words with spaces between words and punctuation.

  • Twitter may launch the service towards the end of the first quarter but has not set an official date, Re/code said, citing sources familiar with the plans. They said the character limit could change before the final version of the product is unveiled.

  • Jack Dorsey, the company's co-founder, who returned as chief executive in October, in a series of tweets did not say whether Twitter would expand the limit. But he did call it "a beautiful constraint."

  • He added that the company has seen more people sharing screenshots of text, which are a way to get around the 140-character limit.

  • "We're not going to be shy about building more utility and power into Twitter for people," Dorsey wrote in a screenshot of text that was longer than 140 characters. "As long as it's consistent with what people want to do, we're going to explore it."

  • The micro-blogging website, in an attempt to keep the current look for the Twitter timeline, is testing a version of the product that displays 140-character tweets but expands to reveal more content when users click on the tweet, Re/code said.

  • Twitter has been experimenting under Dorsey to make the service more engaging.

  • In the few months since Dorsey returned, Twitter introduced the 'Moments' feature, added polls to tweets, rolled out a "buy" button and replaced its star-shaped "favourite" icon with a heart-shaped icon called "like."

  • Twitter has come under increasing pressure to boost user growth and ad revenue. It had its slowest user growth in 2015 - it now boasts just over 300 million users - and was eclipsed by photo-sharing app Instagram, owned by Facebook, which surpassed 400 million users last year.

 

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