Twitter users won't be getting the option to compose long tweets after all. The company's co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey revealed on Friday that the social network has decided to keep its current 140-character limit.
Twitter previously said that it was thinking about increasing the limit to how many characters a single tweet can hold, considering expanding it to be as long as 10,000 characters.
Dorsey cleared up the suspicion and announced he has ruled against the possibility during an interview on NBC's Today Show this morning.
"It's staying," he said, referring to the current limit. "It's a good constraint for us and it allows for of-the-moment brevity."
The decision to keep tweets the way they are may come as a relief to some users who are known to voice their opinions about changes to the platform. However, other users might be disappointed that they will still have to break up their Twitter rants to be displayed in a series of numbered tweets.
Still, there are other ways to expand on the character limit. Users can upload a photo and tap on "Who's in this photo" to tag accounts instead of using up the available characters and still mention others. Some users tweet images of text as another way to include everything they want to say without being constricted.
Dorsey previously addressed this trend in a tweet that featured a screen shot of text back in January. "Instead, what if that text ... was actually text? Text that could be searched. Text that could be highlighted," he wrote.
— Jack (@jack) January 5, 2016
While this might have teased that a change could come, he also notes that the limit is a "beautiful constraint." The whole point of Twitter to be fast conversations.
The character restriction was added back in the site's early days so that tweets fit into a single SMS message.
Even though there will be changes to how many characters fit into a tweet, Twitter did remove the 140-character limit for direct messages last August. That also doesn't mean the platform will not continue to change in other ways. The company has started to roll out its algorithm-based timelines to more users, switching its policy to now making users opt-out. Previously, they had the choice to enable the new timeline instead of it being changed for them.
Twitter is celebrating its 10th anniversary, and has grown to currently have 320 million active users.
Source: Today
Photo: Esther Vargas | Flickr
