Twitter to expand 140 character tweet limit

According to a report from Recode along with several other relatively reliable sources, Twitter is planning to launch a new Twitter product that will allow users to exceed the current 140 character limit.

The 140 character limit has been a defining quality of the social media service and has become a trademark feature, but sources claim that Twitter are trying to expand their reach which has led to them considering expanding the current limitations of tweets.

Over the years, many have asked for the 140 character limit to be extended, which has led to apps like OneShot enabling users to take screen shot blocks of text and tweet them. However, these are only images within texts not texts posted on Twitter.

At the present, there is very little known about Twitters new product, but sources claim that Twitter will be rolling out a new product that allows for longer tweets. This is interesting as the description indicates that Twitter won’t be ditching the 140 character limit altogether but adding a new feature to allow to post long tweets.

Twitter have been openly talking about tweaking how they measure the 140 character limit, suggesting that they remove links as well as the user handles from the 140 character count which would save a fair amount of characters.

In April, Twitter also started to allow users to retweet with a comment which freed up more room to write in a comment on the tweet as well.  

And in June, they removed the 140 character limit from private messages, allowing for longer messages.

From the latest changes, it does look like Twitter could be going down this path of lengthening the character limit. However this move is likely to change how Twitter works and it isn’t clear if this change will be good or bad for Twitter.

Many Twitter users aren’t happy about the removal of the trademark 140 character limit, claiming it will “ruin Twitter” but enable users to tweet longer snippets of content may encourage more people to publish directly to Twitter more often.

Only time will tell if increasing the character limit will entice more users and tweets or deter followers…