Nothing is more definitive about Twitter than its character limit. You get 140 characters to say what you want to say, and that’s it. Or, perhaps, was it, if current rumors are any indication.
No, you won’t suddenly be scrolling through lengthy screeds in your timeline, but Twitter is considering allowing longer tweets, up to 10,000 characters, and showing just the first 140. If you want to read the rest, you can click to expand the tweet, or as other websites call it, the “blog post,” and give the whole thing a look.
Why is Twitter doing this? The same reason a social-media platform does anything, it needs money, and to make money, it’s trying to keep your eyeballs on Twitter. You may have noticed that going to an individual page for a tweet loads a promoted tweet underneath it. This likely will give advertisers more tools to market their products and Twitter users more space to share their thoughts. Not coincidentally, it’ll probably surround your thoughts with the thoughts of advertisers.
It’s not clear when this new jumbo tweet feature might debut, but rumor has it as coming soon, possibly by the end of March. On the bright side, at least these enormous tweets don’t auto-load, so you’ll be spared the thoughts of some guy you followed on the great political problems of the day. Or at least, 10,000 characters worth of them.
(Via Re/Code)