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For years, Twitter’s niche draw was that you could only make a post that had 140 characters or less. While small, people embraced the limit as a challenge to purvey meaningful thoughts with as few words as possible. Some people really do put out great Tweets with 140 characters. A good link to continue the thought is usually placed somewhere in there, as well.
But people love to talk, apparently. That’s why services like Twitlonger have spawned, and people often use more than one Tweet to continue a long thought if they have something to say. Despite this, Twitter hasn’t wavered on its 140 character limit — that might not be true for much longer.
Re-Code is reporting that Twitter is looking to raise the character limits for Tweets to 10,000 characters, which you might know is the same limit imposed on direct messages. 10,000 characters is a ton to say whatever you need to say.
Twitter has to tread carefully with this move. The benefit of fewer characters for most people is that they can quickly move through a timeline of Tweets and get caught up on happenings in just a few minutes. The supposed implementation of the feature will involve placing a button that lets you know there is more content within a Tweet, and will presumably invite you to click to expand it. That should create a nice balance between brevity and richness of content, so those who want more get more, and those who don’t, well, don’t.
We’re not sure why Twitter feels the need to make the move at this point, though. Pressure from Facebook? Plans to eventually grow into a more traditional social network? Are they simply running out of big ideas? No one can know for sure right now, of course, but regardless of reasoning it’ll surely be the biggest change to Twitter to date. The change is said to be going down by the end of Q1. Let us know how you’d feel about it whenever or if it ever happens.
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