Twitter may finally be answering all of your prayers by planning to say goodbye to its 140-character limit and allowing you to get even more complex and poetic during your tweeting process. We’ve seen your Facebook rants, so we’re not sure if we should be excited about this or terrified.
According to Re/Code, Twitter plans on building a product (similar to OneShot and Twitlonger) that may make it easier for users to share longer tweets. The company has recently suffered a decline in growth, so the changes are being made in order to increase usage and engagement. Just last month, the site lifted the character count on private messaging. The 140-character limit has always been a staple of Twitter, but has always been criticized by users arguing for expansion and has even been an internal topic of discussion by Twitter execs for years, Re/Code reports.
In the age of the smart phone, we clearly are capable of moving beyond 140-character snapshots. That being said, if there’s anything Twitter is widely known for, it’s the character limit, which is why the way the company goes about implementing this change is pretty important. It takes a bit of talent to spend almost ten years mastering the art of saying a whole lot without saying much at all. Though there are lots of talks about this change taking place, Twitter may also be changing the way the site counts the characters in a given tweet. This means that handles, links, and even pictures may no longer be included in the count.
“Twitter moving beyond 140 characters in the very limited way that’s being described makes perfect sense,” Jan Dawson, chief analyst at Jackdaw Research, told USA Today. “Essentially, Twitter would take some of the clutter —usernames, links, and images—that currently takes up some of those precious characters and move it outside the scope of the 140 characters.”
Of course, the plan may never actually get put into action but, if Twitter plans on expanding its audience, tweaking the process a little wouldn’t hurt.