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

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."

2 of 174 comments (clear)

  1. Re:done before... by Beck_Neard · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You didn't even RTFA.

    They aren't going to increase the word limit. They are simply going to provide an 'extended tweet' functionality where you can add more text as an 'add-on' to your tweet.

    You can already link images and shit in your tweets; and a lot of people just post images containing text. This would keep people from doing that. I can't fathom why morons are complaining about this.

    --
    A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
  2. 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.