Twitter disowning the 140 character limit would be like Joey Tribbiani sharing food with someone, or Stephen Hawking deciding that he no longer wants to be a physicist. While, many may pass this off as a rumor, various media reports claim that new chief Jack Dorsey plans to drop the microblogging site’s signature feature and a raise the character limit on tweets.
The reports started circulating shortly after Chinese social network Sina Weibo removed its 140 character limit. The new format will allow users to post up to 2,000 characters in length. According to a report from China’s Xinhua News, the change is set to roll out to “senior users” on January 28th and blanket all other accounts a month later.
The company dropped the limit for direct messages in August last year, but it’s not clear what the final product sans the character limit will look like. Sources familiar with the matter claim that the social network will allow users to publish long-form content.
Presently, users can tweet large chunks of text using OneShot and Xcerpt, but those are simply screenshots, not the actual text. By dropping the character limit for a tweet, users will be able to cram more information into a single tweet.
Twitter’s eastern competitor, Sina Weibo will still only allow users to see 140 characters per message in their feeds. They’ll need to click a link to read the whole post if it exceeds the original character limit.
Twitter has made astronomical changes to its layout in the past several years. In 2013, it started allowing photo previews into the TL. Before that, it allowed linked articles from web publishers to appear in a preview format.
While, this may enable everyone to send Tweets of 140 characters or more, many users are on warmongering-mode after the news of the character-limit-axe became public.
What do you think? Would this be a major misstep for Twitter? Will the microblogging site’s identity disappear in the mist of characters longer than 140?
