Twitter plans to increase character limit in tweets to 10,000
06 Jan 2016
Soon, Twitter users may not be constrained by the number of words they can use in their tweets.
The San Francisco company plans to allow tweets as long as 10,000 characters - more than 78 times longer than the current limit of 140 characters.
Though the company has not talked about the change, sources familiar with the development have spoken anonymously to The Wall Street Journal and Re/code. The size limit of direct messages was increased to 10,000 characters in July, when co-founder Jack Dorsey rejoined the company as its chief executive officer.
The 140-character ceiling had been established in 2006, a response to the 160-character limit that SMS text messages had on mobile phones.
According to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, he would like to expand the size of Tweets because users were effectively doing that anyway, with the addition of screenshots of stories and other workarounds.
According to commentators, it seemed Twitter was also effectively expanding its role as a publisher, by hosting more content on its own service, which was in keeping with the trend seen in the last year from Facebook, Snapchat, Apple and Google.
Meanwhile, Peter Kafka of re/code asked Twitter COO Adam Bain, in an interview, whether the move signalled Twitter would be hosting articles.
Bain said that Twitter had been certainly helping content companies to bring video content close to consumers.
To a question whether mindset at Twitter, which was about driving audiences to publishers' properties had changed, Bain replied that Twitter had built a great win-win relationship with publishers.
He added Twitter had win-win in terms of driving audiences not just digitally but also offline audience.
Asked whether the push to drive audiences had diminished now that it was common for tech companies to host content, Bain said, ''I think ultimately what the publishers care about is control, audience and monetization. And it's been consistent – everything we do on the platform has been along those three lines: 'How do we give them as much control as we possibly can,' 'how do we give them as much audience as we possibly can,' 'how do we generate revenue together in a way that gives them as much revenue as we possibly can'. Nothing that we have planned in 2016 deviates from that at all.''
