Is Twitter rethinking its 140 character limit?
Speculation — by way of tweets — was rampant on Tuesday.
The company is said to be looking to lift the character limit to 10,000 by the end of this quarter, according to Re/Code.
Twitter founder and CEO Jack Dorsey took to Twitter Tuesday afternoon to neither confirm nor deny the report.
He posted a Twitter photo of his statement (so he could get around the platform’s current limitations).
The 140 character limit has “become a beautiful constraint,” wrote Dorsey. “It inspires creativity and brevity … We will never lose that feeling.”
But Dorsey reiterated that Twitter wasn’t born with the character restriction, it was added in Twitter’s early days so that text could fit in a single SMS message.
Dorsey said user behavior makes it clear that people might enjoy this new functionality.
“We see [people] taking screenshots of text and tweeting it. Instead, what if that text … was actually text?” he said. “We’re not going to be shy about building more utility and power into Twitter for people.”
This would just be Twitter’s latest change to make its product more user-friendly.
Dorsey introduced Moments — an alternative lens for casual users — in October just one day after he was renamed CEO of the company. Twitter also extended its 140 character limit in private messages, as well as introduced a display of “while you were away” tweets.
Would a 10,000 character limit mean an end to long strings of numbered tweets — known as “tweetstorms”?
Not so. “I love tweetstorms! Those won’t go away,” said Dorsey.
