Tweet your mind without the 140 character limit
Back in August 2015 Twitter made a big change that removed the 140 character limit from direct messages, so you could message other Twitter users privately with more freedom to say as much as you wanted, but were still restricted when it came to posting publicly on the social media platform. Now, this is all changing as well.
Many sources have claimed that Twitter will soon be ditching the 140 character limit for public tweets as well and introducing a new 10,000 character limit, the same as is now used for direct messages. CEO Jack Dorsey has not confirmed these rumours, but he did send a tweet addressing the claims and even hinted that these changes will be taking place. Dorsey tweeted a long explanation, getting around the current character limit by sharing a picture of his text, rather than typing it.
In this, he talks about the value of having a limit on how much you can type, saying that it "inspires creativity and brevity. And a sense of speed." This is the beauty of Twitter; you can't ramble on about something, you have to be concise with your messages and think of a way to effectively get your point across in a really short space. Plus, bite-sized pieces of information or opinion are quick and easy to read, this is essential now that people mostly get their information on the go and don't have much time to waste. Longer tweets will obviously take longer to read, and people may not have the desire or patience to do this. If users do read them, then due to the fact that they do take more time to read, users will probably end up reading fewer tweets. The fact that the tweets will also take up more space on the screen will also effectively reduce the amount of content people see.
To get around some of these issues, one claim is that Twitter is testing a product that will have tweets still appear with 140 characters as they do now, with the rest of the content viewable when you click to expand the tweet. So people can choose to view the additional content, rather than having it taking up space in their timeline as a default.
There are benefits to being able to write more freely on Twitter; as Jack Dorsey mentioned in his above tweet, if people are sharing actual text rather than a screenshot of text as he did, then keywords in these tweets will be able to be found using the Twitter search function and can also be indexed by search engines such as Google, allowing Twitter to have a greater effect on company's search rankings.
We're sure that more updates and confirmations regarding the new character count will be released in the upcoming weeks and months.
What do you think of the idea of abandoning Twitter's famous 140 character limit- do you love it or loathe it? Let us know in the comments below.