Twitter Plans to Change Its Signature Character Limit

Sources tell re/code the new limit could be 10K characters
By Evann Gastaldo,  Newser Staff
Posted Jan 5, 2016 3:12 PM CST
Twitter Plans to Change Its Signature Character Limit
In this Feb. 2, 2013, file photo, a smartphone display shows the Twitter logo in Berlin, Germany.   (AP Photo/dpa, Soeren Stache, File)

Is Twitter about to change its very essence? Multiple sources tell re/code that the company plans to allow users to tweet things that are up to 10,000 characters, rather than just 140, though you won't see all 10,000 characters on your feed. Rather, the typical 140 characters would be displayed, followed by a "call to action" signaling that you can click on the tweet to expand it and reveal the rest of the content. One source says that adding more content has, in the past, caused user engagement to go down, so Twitter doesn't want to make a huge change to what users see when they scroll.

Twitter is currently testing that version of the product, referred to inside Twitter as "Beyond 140," and the company wants to launch it by the end of the first quarter. But there's no official launch date yet, and neither the design nor the new character limit are finalized. And at Gizmodo, Adam Clark Estes urges everyone to take the news with a grain of salt: "Some anonymous sources in Silicon Valley think that the publicly traded company might make some changes at the end of the first quarter. Those changes might include a rumored new feature that said anonymous source call 'Beyond 140.' The feature might give users the ability to do longer tweets, perhaps as long as the current 10,000-character limit allowed in direct messages." But none of this has happened in reality, and he doubts it will catch on. (More Twitter stories.)

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