There was some talk, not long ago, about Twitter looking to remove their 140-character limit that has been in place since its inception nearly 10 years ago. In fact, the 140-character limit is really what defined Twitter. Back in 2006, Twitter was founded, and was modeling it’s limit on characters after the SMS limit. SMS or text messages were limited to 160 characters, and Twitter decided that the other 20 characters would be used for links, although links do still count in the 140-character limit, so that didn’t make much sense.
Recently Twitter extended their DM limit from 140 characters to 10,000 characters. Making it so that you can send messages as long as you want. But it looks like the regular, public posts will remain at 140 characters, at least for now. Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey was on the Today Show and stated that the limit was staying, “it’s a good constraint for us and it allows for of-the-moment brevity.” So this means that tweet-storms will continue to stick around, at least for the foreseeable future.
The company is still looking at ways to get their users more involved and spending more time on Twitter. Not only to grow their reach by adding more users, but by having their existing users spending more time on the platform, it’ll lead to them being able to make more money from advertising. Which is also good, and it will bring in more advertisers as well. Twitter has been around for 10 years, but it only really started to gain in popularity around 2009. That’s when many started picking up on the platform, and some celebrities got involved. Since then, we’ve seen Twitter become incorporated in just about everything we do. We see it on TV shows using their own hashtag for Twitter, some use it as a way to make a poll on a TV show – which gets their hashtag into the trending topics and more eyes onto that show. It’s a great marketing platform as well. As you can reach out to anyone, basically.
Twitter has grown up in these ten years, but the 140-character limit appears to be the constant and will continue to be.