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Twitter To Extend 140-Character Limit For Tweets (recode.net)

Posted by Soulskill on from the describing-your-breakfast-in-greater-detail dept.

An anonymous reader writes: According to Re/code, Twitter is doing away with its 140-character limit for tweets. The company is currently planning on increasing the limit to 10,000 characters, though the final number may change before they roll it out. "Twitter is currently testing a version of the product in which tweets appear the same way they do now, displaying just 140 characters, with some kind of call to action that there is more content you can't see. Clicking on the tweets would then expand them to reveal more content. The point of this is to keep the same look and feel for your timeline, although this design is not necessarily final, sources say."

3 of 174 comments (clear)

  1. So... by taxman_10m · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Is Twitter only threatening suicide or do they really mean it?

  2. this is good for press blasts by YesIAmAScript · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Right now people have taken to including a picture of text in their tweet when announcing big stuff. This is a disaster. It doesn't wrap well for different screen sizes and it makes things hard those assistive devices for poor sight, as they are better at reading text to them than communicating pictures.

    Something must be done. Maybe this is the right fix.

    After we fix that we can go on to eliminating vertical videos.

    --
    http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
  3. Re:10K ought to be enough for anybody by arth1 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Minimal compared to what they would have paid to send the messages by SMS (before unlimited plans).

    Before "before unlimited plans", SMS used to be free. The phone companies didn't start charging for SMS until the late 90s.

    First, there was no cost as it was part of the GSM standard, and the packets went in-between other traffic, creating no extra load. With GSM being the only system that had text messaging, there was no talks of charging anything. If anything, it was meant to generate traffic like "please call me when you can", and promote increased talk time.

    But then the phone companies went to extra steps to be able to block SMS, so they could charge fees for not blocking it, backwards as it sounds.
    And as if that wasn't enough, they went one step further, and started counting SMSes and where they terminated, so they could charge extra for both the amount and the source/destination.

    Now they're offering "unlimited" SMS. Which was free in the first place. And most of them don't even offer unlimited SMS, but charge extra for sending or receiving SMS across borders, or requiring an extra monthly fee for that privilege on top of the "unlimited".
    It's a rip-off.