Twitter’s 140-character limit is here to stay

Twitter’s much-loved 140-character limit is “staying.” That’s what Jack Dorsey, one of the company’s founders and its newly-reinstated CEO said in an appearance on the Today show on Friday. Rumors in January about Twitter switching from a 140-character limit to a 10,000-character limit were met with overwhelming derision from users who felt the platform’s built-in brevity is its soul. However, Dorsey told presenters Carson Daly and Matt Lauer that 140 characters was “a good constraint for us.” “It allows for of-the-moment brevity,” he added. This is a difficult time for the company, which is struggling to monetize the service in the way that larger social networks or tech companies like Facebook and Google have been able to do, as well as grow its user base, which has hit an apparent ceiling at 300m. Its stock price has been in a precipitous decline for more than a year. In March 2015 Twitter stocks were trading at over $50 per share; today they are worth just $16.83 per share. When the 10,000 characters-rumor surfaced, the company’s share price dropped 2% overnight.