Beyond 140 – Twitter May Increase Tweets Limits To 10,000 Characters

Twitter Inc. is building a new feature that will allow users post messages as long as 10,000 characters from the current 140 for tweets, according to a new report from Re/code. The micro-blogging website, which currently has a 140-character limit, is considering launching the service toward the end of Q1, although there is no official date as testing continues on the project known inside the company as Beyond 140.

In August, Twitter lifted the 140-character limit on its Direct Private Messages products, opting for the much larger 10,000 limit and now Twitter might do the same for its public messages.

According to Recode, Twitter is giving a lot of thought as to how to make this change without making the stream feel immediately alien. One option, for instance, is to just show the first 140 characters by default in the news feed and then allow readers to click to expand the tweet and see the other 9,860 remaining characters, sort of what like Twitlonger and other third party services do.

Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder and CEO, has been pushing the company to think of ways to make the product more engaging.

This new tweet limit, Beyond 140, could also turnoff many users who prefer the concise 140-character limit. Twitter users responded to the news – Beyond 140 – and the response was largely negative:

http://twitter.com/danprimack/status/684422619223871488/photo/1

If Twitter moves to 10,000 characters, email must move to 140 characters.

It's only fair.

— M.G. Siegler (@mgsiegler) January 5, 2016

This is terrible news for people like me whose core, career-defining skill is writing concise sentences that are exactly 140 characters long

— Tom Gara (@tomgara) January 5, 2016