Report: Twitter Considers a New Way to Extend the 140 Character Limit

[engine]

According to this report, twitter may be looking at ways to extend the 140 character limit for tweets, in a similar way to its DMs.

The 140 character limit is one thing that makes twitter unique, and the succinct short tweets force people to focus on the key parts of the message. Extending it might be appealing to some, but it may lose others.

Twitter is building a new product that will allow users to share tweets that are longer than the company’s 140-character limit, according to multiple people familiar with the company’s plans.

It’s unclear what the product will look like, but sources say it would enable Twitter users to publish long-form content to the service. Users can already tweet out blocks of text with products like OneShot, but those are simply images, not actual text published on Twitter. A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment. Report: Twitter Considers a New Way to Extend the 140 Character Limit [recode.net]

[Rumbas]

Now that's interesting! Better keep an eye on this, but imagine what happens to twitter and all the places where tweets not are an integrated part. Websites, tv shows, apps etc.

[pageoneresults]

I was doing 250 character Tweets back in 2008. I accidentally discovered the ability one day while developing a desktop application for Twitter. I called them Super Tweets and they were all the rave. "How did you do that?" "Is Twitter broken?" There were all sorts of surprised comments. At the same time, I also discovered that you could send 918 characters in one DM. I had fun while it lasted, Twitter patched all of that up as time went on. It wasn't rocket science or anything, all you had to do was turn off JS and the 140 limitation was gone. You could Tweet up to 250 characters.

I think this is a bad move. That 140 character limit has something special to it. It forces you to use brevity and really focus on what you want to say.

[tangor]

While I don't use twitter, I have enjoyed many tweets when they appear in other media (news stories, ect) as that brevity has at times been most illuminating! That may be lost if "more" is there.

[ergophobe]

>>I was doing 250 character Tweets back in 2008

I remember your Super Tweets method from back then. I was wondering just the other day if it still worked, but didn't get around to checking.

>>That 140 character limit has something special to it

I think it is the only thing that keeps Twitter going. If it allows long tweets with images, why not Facebook, Tumblr, G+? What makes Twitter different at that point?

Of course, it opens whole new vistas for advertising at a time when ad blockers are getting added to browsers at an alarming rate. So it may be in the end that Apple and Twitter have an actual business model, while Google and Facebook don't (since overwhelmingly people use Twitter through an app rather than on the web).

[graeme_p]

Tumblr and Google+ do not have the same user base. FB is focused on private comments to friends, not a public stream for everyone who wants to to follow.