Have you heard the big news? Earlier this month Twitter announced that this year may see the end of the site’s 140 character limit for tweets. The plan is to replace it with a [highlight] 10 000 character [/highlight] limit and nobody really knows how to feel about all this.
When Twitter first emerged 10 years ago, it was primarily an SMS based service. This is where the 140 character limited originated since SMS messages were limited to 160 characters and this ensured that an entire tweet could be sent in one message. Since then, the site has advanced extensively but throughout all this time has kept the original character limit. Many users claim that this feature inspires you to be brief and creative and is what makes Twitter so unique. However Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey, says otherwise. In a tweet reporting that the company is working on a feature that would allow people to send tweets that are 10,000 characters long, Dorsey insisted that it is rather the fast, public and live conversational nature of site that makes Twitter so special.
This drastic proposed change to the site comes as no surprise to the insiders in the tech-world. It’s a tip-toed around fact that Twitter never reached a billion users, making it a smaller platform than Instagram. As a result, the site has had to do quite a bit of soul-searching and research into how best to fully optimize the ‘Twitter experience’ for its users and increase the interaction on the site. Their research showed that more and more users are starting to take screenshots of text and share it as a way of getting around the 140 character limit.
If Twitter does go ahead and decide to change this, it won’t be the first change that the site has seen. Not too long ago, Twitter also decided to change their option from ‘favouriting’ a tweet, to ‘liking’ a tweet in an effort to make the site more user-friendly and universal.
“We’re not going to be shy about building more utility and power into Twitter for people. As long as it’s consistent with what people like to do, we’ll explore it.” –Jack Dorsey [highlight] tweeted [/highlight] .
Reactions to the news of the possible change to the character limit have been mixed, with some believing that without the limit, the essence of Twitter will be lost. Others believe that it will increase the usability and effectiveness of Twitter tenfold. As, for us, well we haven’t quite decided yet. As a marketing platform, we have grown accustomed to the brevity of Twitter however this change could have the potential to increase the effectiveness of the site as a marketing tool. Only time and testing will tell what lies beyond the 140 character limit.