TWITTER appears set to loosen its decade-old restriction on the length of tweets in a bid to appeal to a wider audience.
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| Twitter's iconic 140 character limit could be about to change |
Twitter could be on the verge of loosening its decade-old restriction on the length of tweets – 140 characters.
The US social network hopes the increased freedom will help it to appeal to a larger audience, currently catered for by Facebook, Reddit and other forums.
CEO Jack Dorsey telegraphed Twitter's intentions in a tweet published after the technology site Re/Code reported the company was exploring increasing its limits on text from 140 characters to as many as 10,000.
Twitter co-founder Mr Dorsey didn't directly address the Re/Code report that cited unnamed people, but he made it clear that Twitter is not wedded to its 140-character limit.
He illustrated his point by posting a screenshot of a text consisting of 1,325 characters.
— Jack (@jack) January 5, 2016
If Twitter were to allow tweets to span 10,000 characters, it could produce 1,700-word dissertations, based on the size of Mr Dorsey's extended post.
In his message, the CEO wrote that Twitter has already noticed that many of its roughly 300 million users already have been including screenshots of lengthy texts in their tweets.
He indicated Twitter is examining ways to give people more room to express themselves without polluting the service with gasbags.
Imposing some restraint "inspires creativity and brevity. And a sense of speed.
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| Twitter introduced the 140-character limit on messages to mirror the 160 character limit on SMS |
"We will never lose that feeling," Mr Dorsey pledged.
At the same time, Mr Dorsey said Twitter isn't "going to be shy about building more utility and power into Twitter for people. As long as it's consistent with what people want to do, we're going to explore it."
Analysts said the Twitter co-founder is probably trying to avoid a backlash among long-time Twitter users who consider the 140-character tweeting limit sacred.
At the same time, he needs to respond to company shareholders pining for a bigger audience that would generate more advertising revenue.
More revenue eventually could help Twitter turn a profit for the first time in its history.
Twitter can't afford "to become stagnant, they need to get bigger if they want to build a more relevant advertising platform," said Topeka Capital Markets analyst Blake Harper.
After a long streak of robust growth that turned it into one of the Internet's hottest companies, Twitter's growth has slowed dramatically during the past year-and-half to leave it scrambling to catch up with social networking leader Facebook and its 1.5 billion users.
Twitter's malaise resulted in the departure of Dick Costolo as the company's CEO last July and ushered in the return of Jack Dorsey, who had been ousted as the company's leader in 2008.
i swear to god the first person who tweets over 140 characters gets unfollowed and blocked immediately.
— Dad (@markhoppus) January 5, 2016
The pressure has been building on the returning co-founder to take drastic measures to accelerate user growth as Twitter's stock has sunk further below its November 2013 initial public offering price of $26.
Mr Dorsey helped invent Twitter in 2006 and imposed a 140-character limit on messages so the service would be easy to use on cellphones that had 160-character limits on texts at that time.
Those texting limits on phones faded away several years ago as the advent of smartphones enabled people to use other Internet messaging services, making Twitter's restrictions look increasingly antiquated.
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