Twitter upgraded its private Direct Messaging feature last year to increase the character limit from 140 to 10,000 characters, but CEO Jack Dorsey shared in an interview with NBC’s “Today” show this morning that the same change will not be coming to tweets. As Variety reports:
On NBC’s “Today” show Friday, Dorsey said the company has no plans to expand the 140-character limit, which dates back to Twitter’s launch in 2006. “It’s staying,” he said. “It’s a good constraint for us, and… it allows for of-the-moment for everything.”
The 140 character limit was first put in place to enable the social network to post messages from SMS, which has a 160 character limit per text message, but concern that expanding Twitter’s character limit would change the nature of the social network has clearly won out.
In the past, however, Dorsey has tweeted screenshots of text walls from Apple’s Notes app to communicate a lengthier message that wouldn’t fit in 140 characters, but text shots present their own problems like lack of being found in search and being easily translated in other languages.
Dorsey’s comments today do not rule out the possibility of Twitter adding a new attachment card for passages of text, in the same way you can add polls or photo galleries to tweets today.
Personally, I find the 140 character limit overly restrictive when tweeting with URLs and images, which I’d love to see not count so tweeting full article headlines and lengthier commentary would be easier. Given a few more characters to work with, Apple may find its new Twitter support easier to pull off as well, although it seems to be making out okay with Direct Messages as a backup. Oh well, I guess that leaves more time to fix up the sorta-botched Twitter for Mac app …
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We need 200-character limit excluding the ‘space & symbols’
I agree, I also think links and pictures \ video should be excluded as well.
Hes concerned that raising the limit might actually make Twitter useful. Also Twitter isn’t a network, social or otherwise, it’s a message broadcasting system. Period. Facebook is a social network and the only one with any play today. Twitter isn’t long for this world unfortunately.
Twitter needs to exclude counting @?????, links, and images. That is, 140 characters of content excluding URL, images, and reply names. It’s kind of obvious and a necessary fix to make the site better.
I’ve always thought excluding @Mentions & Links from the count but keeping the 140 limit otherwise would be a good compromise.