Instagram limited itself to using square pictures, Snapchat limited itself to sending disappearing messages, and Twitter limited itself to supporting 140-character or less posts. These limitations are the quirks that made these social networks what they are today, but now that the three of them have attained hundreds of millions of users, it’s time to remove these limitations/quirks and give users more freedom with their content. Instagram is doing it, Snapchat is doing it, and now it looks like Twitter is doing it too, as some recent reports claim that the company is working on a new product that would allow users to share tweets that are longer than 140 characters.
Twitter is building a new product that will allow users to share tweets that are longer than the company’s 140-character limit, according to multiple people familiar with the company’s plans. It’s unclear what the product will look like, but sources say it would enable Twitter users to publish long-form content to the service. Users can already tweet out blocks of text with products like OneShot, but those are simply images, not actual text published on Twitter. A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment. The 140-character limit has been one of Twitter’s trademark features since day one. It has long been scrutinized by those outside the company, and many have argued over the years that Twitter should expand it. It has also been a topic of discussion internally at Twitter for years, according to multiple sources, and has resurfaced in recent months under interim CEO Jack Dorsey as the company has been exploring new ways to grow its user base. In addition to the long-form product, execs have been openly discussing the idea of tweaking how Twitter measures its 140-character limit by removing things like links and user handles from the count, multiple sources say.
