Since Twitter’s inception, tweets have been 140 characters long. It’s what quickly separated the service from traditional blogging platforms. Short bursts of text – news, comedy, status updates – and quick, to-the-point information is what Twitter’s about.
Now, not everyone has always loved Twitter’s character limit – but for years it has remained. Those days may be coming to an end.
At least that’s the word from Re/code, which quotes multiple sources in saying that “Twitter is building a new product that will allow users to share tweets that are longer than the company’s 140-character limit.”
The shape of said product was not divulged.
For years, users wishing to get around Twitter’s character limit have resorted to third-party services like TwitLonger and Twenth. These services allow users to post longer-than-140 messages, but still display the confined character limit with a link to the rest of the content.
Users also take screenshots of longer messages, constructed in a Notes app of some other social media app.
Point is, there is demand from the more verbose in the Twitterverse.
Twitter has made small changes to the core service to encourage more words. Earlier this year, Twitter allowed users to “retweet with comment”, showing the retweeted tweet as a card inside the tweet, freeing up the 140 characters for full comment.
And just last month, Twitter lifted the cap on Direct Messages. They can now be 10,000 characters.
But giving users a way to natively produce greater-than-140-character tweets would be a huge change to the core service. What do you think? Team 140 or Team 140+?
Image via Andreas Eldh, Flickr Creative Commons