Twitter is said to change its character limit, from 140 characters to thousands for one tweet. The maximum number of characters per tweet could be up to 10,000 or half of that. But this will depend on how users would respond to trials. The changes haven’t been implemented yet. However, it will come soon.
Twitter Dropping the 140-Character Limit and Gives User Thousands of Characters Per Tweet – What’s the Catch?
The new CEO and co-founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, is encouraging his employees and developers to think of ways on how to make the service more engaging.
In December 2015, the company has been experimenting with a new order of timeline. It displays users the most relevant content first. This means that it gets rid of the usual format of displaying posts in reverse chronological order.
And in August 2015, it removed the 140-character limit on direct or private message sent between users.
If the 140-character limit would be gone, your timeline would be overwhelmed with article-length tweets. The new limit would encourage users to write more without leaving the service.
But, even if you’re allowed to write up to 10,000 characters, your timeline would only reveal 140 characters. To reveal the rest of the post, you need to tap a button. According to reports from Re/Code, this latest feature might be introduced in late first quarter.
This new limit might help in easing the learning curve for those who are just getting started on Twitter. It might also assist the service in solving its ongoing growth problem. If the user would no longer be forced to cram their thoughts into a few dozen words, they could tweet the same way they update their Facebook status.
It could also reduce text screenshots and external blogs.
But the beauty of Twitter is that of its information density. Since users are limited to 140 characters, they have to condense their thoughts into bite-size information. This makes it easier to learn quickly while scrolling through their timeline.
Now, if the character limit is dropped, it would dilute the stream with some nonsense tweets. Then, it would also interrupt users while scrolling as they have to expand the tweets to read the rest of the post.
The challenge to Twitter is to come up with a design that allows but discourages tweets that are more than 140 characters and permits longer thoughts whenever necessary. This will preserve the information density that you can only find on Twitter.
Why are 10,000 characters not a good idea?
Do you now what it looks like to read a 10,000-character post? TechCrunch will help you visualise it. The latest number of characters might bore other users, especially those who don’t like reading a news article.
Currently, users will see headlines and previewed links. If they want to see the full length of the article, they need to click the link. This will result in referral traffic, which is important to bloggers and news publishers. For users, it’s a bad thing because they will have to wait for the links to load.
For diehard users of Twitter, they are apprehensive about the company’s plan to drop the character limit, which has been that way since its birth. But dropping the character limit might be the answer to the stagnant growth of Twitter and it would make the service less complicated to newcomers.
