Yesterday, a report suggested that Twitter was considering to increase the character limit for tweets from the idiosyncratic 140 character limit to a whopping 10,000 characters. This was not surprising since Twitter upgraded the DM character limit to the same number, but regular users of the service were concerned of the rumoured change.
— jack (@jack) January 5, 2016
Moments after the news went viral, Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder and current CEO posted a tweet that seemed to be his thoughts towards the issue albeit he didn’t explicitly say. “We didn’t start Twitter with a 140 character restriction. We added that early on to fit into a single SMS message” he says on the post. “It’s become a beautiful constraint and I love it! It inspires creativity and brevity”. He also gave an assurance that the brevity aspect of Twitter will not be lost “We will never lose that feeling” he says.
Dorsey also revealed that Twitter has been monitoring how people use the platform where they have noticed they take screenshots of texts and tweeting them (He did exactly that in this tweet). This is where it gets interesting, he actually gave a subtle hint to the idea of longer tweets: “What if that text (screenshots) was actually text? Text that could be searched. Text that could be highlighted. That’s more utility and power.”
He goes on to say that “…the majority of tweets will always be short and sweet and conversational” which gives an idea of how Twitter will implement this. Just like how they added the option to extend a poll’s options, they could include a tab that will allow a user to extend the character limit but still retaining the 140 character limit as default. Also, Jack Dorsey endorsed tweetstorms (threaded tweets) and promised they won’t go away so keep threading!
