Twitter has already increased the character limit on Direct Messages, which are private tweets between users, to 10,000 from 140.
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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.
He used a picture of text, containing 1,325 characters, to tell followers what may be in store. But long-winded tweets soon may be upon us, according to tech news site Recode.
He says many people are already circumventing the limit by taking screenshots of texts and tweeting those.
Those texting limits on phones faded away several years ago as the advent of smartphones enabled people to use other Internet messaging services, making Twitter’s restrictions look increasingly antiquated.
Imposing some restraint “inspires creativity and brevity. We will never lose that feeling”.
At the same time, he said Twitter wasn’t “going to be shy about building more utility and power into Twitter for people”. “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”, recode.net said, quoting sources.
However, he also has to respond to a growing number of shareholders discontent with lack of advertising revenue.
Twitter founder and CEO Jack Dorsey took to Twitter (TWTR, Tech30) Tuesday afternoon to neither confirm nor deny the report. 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 Inc, which surpassed 400 million users previous year.
Dorsey helped invent Twitter in 2006 and imposed a 140-character limit on messages so the service would be easy to use on cellphones that had 160-character limits on texts at that time.
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Twitter’s share price now stands at $21, down from a peak of $69 in January 2014. “They need to do something to drive more usage of the service”. Such a feature would allow Twitter to compete with platforms like Medium, it seems.
