14 DAY TRIAL // After months of speculation, Twitter's new (but old) CEO Jack Dorsey has posted a statement on his Twitter account, confirming rumors that his company is pondering the idea of removing the famous 140-character limit for tweets.
Rumors first surfaced towards the end of September, just after Twitter removed the 140-character limit for private messages (also referred to as DMs).
The same rumor resurfaced yesterday, and after making it to the headlines of various high-profile tech blogs, user angst forced the company to eventually take notice and issue a reply.
As a result, Jack Dorsey, the company's recently re-appointed CEO, has posted a message about the company's plans (embedded in full, below the article).
Jack goes on to acknowledge the 140-character limit for tweets is one of the site's most distinguishable features, a constraint that has made Twitter stand out from other similar micro-blogging websites that launched at the same time as the company did.
Mega-tweets are coming, developers will know when first
Introduced to allow status updates to be sent via SMS messages, the 140-character limit has become both a beloved feature and an annoyance at the same time. Every Twitter user was abruptly cut off, at one point or another, by the 140-character tweet limit. We've all been there.
With the site's user numbers hanging on around the 300 million mark for quite some time now, the social network's management is now more than ever pressed to listen to non-standard feature exploration scenarios.
While freeing up tweets from 140 to 10,000 characters may seem a bad idea for some and a good one for others, Mr. Dorsey says that, if this ever happens, it won't be in the form of a rumor spread by the press.
"And as I said at #flight [Twitter's developer conference], if we decide to ship what we explore, we're telling developers well in advance, so they can prepare accordingly," Mr. Dorsey explains.
Re/code's recent report has Twitter removing the 140-character limit by the end of March 2016. A three-month notice is more than enough for any respectable developer.
