Twitter to expand character limit for tweets?

The micro blogging site’s 140-character limit has been around as long as Twitter has and has become part of the product’s personality.

On Tuesday, the company’s co-founder and chief executive Jack Dorsey responded – naturally – on his Twitter account to instant criticism from social media users over this plan. Multiple reports claim Twitter is planning to make the new character limit a whopping 10,000, just like Direct Messages.

Twitter’s 140 character limit on tweets has long frustrated and challenged its most verbose users. “140 characters is not almost enough to express my outrage that Twitter is raising the character limit to 10000” tweeted writer Brian Phillips in 111 characters. “They’ve gotten 300 million users, respectable by any standard but what Twitter wants to have”. The new feature might be of great help for some users, allowing them to share deeper, in-depth information regarding their specific topic or agenda.

So, in other words, in much the same ways that users can now click on an individual tweet to get more information – expanded photos, article summaries, replies to that tweet – a user will theoretically be able to select a tweet to read additional content. “That’s more utility and power”, Dorsey wrote.

He said: “We’re not going to be shy about building more utility and power into Twitter for people”.

Aside from the lengthy think pieces it is known for, Medium has also added support for shorter messages to cover the same territory now occupied by Twitter, the news outlet noted.

Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter believes an increased limit on tweets would be a “good, baby step” to attracting more users to Twitter and believes it could be done without alienating the service’s current audience.

“At its core, Twitter is public messaging”, he said, “a simple way to say something, to anyone, that everyone in the world can see instantly”.

The buzz in the tech market was also that Twitter was working on such kind of product from last September but no engineer from Twitter declined to comment anything on that.