Twitter is currently testing a version of the product in which tweets appear the same way they do now, displaying just 140 characters, with some kind of call to action that there is more content you can’t see.
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“We’ve spent a lot of time observing what people are doing on Twitter, and we see them taking screenshots of text and tweeting it”, he wrote, using a screenshot of text to illustrate his point.
Over the last couple of days, internet has been rife with reports about the higher echelons of Twitter seriously considering going beyond its 140-character limit and allowing 10,000-character tweets.
“140 characters is not almost enough to express my outrage that Twitter is raising the character limit to 10,000”, tweeted writer Brian Phillips in 111 characters. The limit was initially introduced to fit tweets into text messages, which have a 160-character limit.
Would a 10,000 character limit mean an end to long strings of numbered tweets – known as “tweetstorms”?
Twitter has been trying to increase user growth and engagement since co-founder, Jack Dorsey, returned as CEO in July, 2015.
The company has made other recent changes to the platform, including the October introduction of Moments, which allows for the browsing of popular topics, and changing the “favorites” icon from a star to a heart. Most notably, were requests for an “edit button” before expanding the character count.
The 140-character limit has been around as long as Twitter has and has become part of the product’s personality. “We will never lose that feeling”, Dorsey said of the current limit. These advancements can definitely attract a large amount of new users who were first apprehensive of the microblogging service if the reports from sites such as ABC News are to be believed.
He said as long as it was consistent with what people wanted to do, they would explore it. “We didn’t start Twitter with a 140 character restriction”.
Twitter has yet to comment on the article.
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What Dorsey’s saying is that more content can make tweets more powerful, enabling people to spend more time on Twitter.
