Twitter is considering abandoning its 140-character limit on the length of tweets, as chief executive Jack Dorsey plays with ways to revive user growth at the messaging platform.
Shares fell 3 per cent to $21.89 after a report that Twitter was working on extending the length of a tweet to up to 10,000 characters, with investors unsure about how this would change the social site.
Many Twitter users took to the site to complain that changing the limit would damage the core experience of coming up with witty and at-times snarky comments in a succint form. Some indulged an old whine that Twitter is becoming more like Facebook, while others compared the 10,000-character limit to university essays, novels and the TV series Game of Thrones.
Mr Dorsey, the co-founder who came back to lead Twitter last year, later tweeted that the company would explore new ways of sending longer blocks of text, even though it was committed to the “feeling” of creativity, brevity and speed that the 140-character limit gave tweets.
“We’re not going to be shy about building more utility and power into Twitter for people,” he said.
Tweets were originally 140 characters long because many were sent by SMS messages. The limit allowed people to text the name of the person they were addressing and a message within the 160-character limit of an SMS.
Twitter has since expanded the definition of a tweet to include pictures and videos — and many people who want to say more than the character limit have begun to screenshot the text they want to send.
Mr Dorsey said he wanted to make these screenshots more useful, by allowing users to search and highlight the text.
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