Twitter is considering lifting the character limit on tweets, increasing it from 140 characters to a whopping 10,000 characters, Re/code reports.
The character limit is one of the signature features on Twitter — as much as the beloved hashtag or the @-symbol for mentioning other people.
For about a decade now, squeezing messages into 140 characters effectively made them into "tweets": brief messages with news, links, or maybe a picture or two.
Re/code says Twitter is trying to increase user engagement — and allowing tweets to be bigger has more potential for more text, more links, and more pictures. That said, the company doesn't want huge tweets to overwhelm your feed, so it's trying to design these 10,000-character tweets to be non-disruptive to the overall design, which lets you scroll and see a lot of content on your timeline at once.
Twitter reportedly has no "launch date set in stone," but it sounds like the company has been considering this move since at least September. One month prior to that, Twitter had removed the 140-character limit on users' direct messages, so it's not surprising to think this same logic is simply being applied to the overall product.
It's difficult to predict how a move like this could affect Twitter's popularity. Though many perceive the 140-character limit to be one of Twitter's best features, removing this limit may very well attract many new users, which is the goal of both Twitter and its shareholders. The company has tried numerous times to make itself more user-friendly, adopting Facebook-like features and trying a new feature called "Moments" that attempts to summarize all the most popular events occurring at any given moment.
Twitter will reportedly make this move around the first quarter of this year.
