10,000 Characters?!? How Twitter customers Reacted To the latest Rumor

January 5, 2016 characteristic. The a hundred and forty-persona limit that’s just about synonymous with the carrier is getting retooled, consistent with a file in Re/Code. but slightly than boosting the per-tweet limit to 200 and even 500 characters, Twitter is reportedly going all out and extending the limit to 10,000.

The as-yet-unconfirmed new restrict would flip tweets into one thing extra like weblog posts, with every one being displayed as a one hundred forty-personality, expandable preview within the Twitter timeline.

the debate over the utmost length of tweets has been going on for a long time. The personality restrict, a byproduct of the product’s early barriers as an SMS-based totally carrier, is regarded as outdated by means of many users. To others, the pressured brevity is a component of what makes Twitter, neatly, Twitter.

“after they first began the provider, it was once 160 characters, however then they took 20 characters away as a result of they wanted so to ship you the username of the one that tweeted,” says Nick Bilton, the the big apple occasions columnist who wrote the seminal e book chronicling the early days of Twitter. “but the technologies surrounding the premise of this product have modified.”

Bilton, who informed us in October that he does not prefer a character restrict elevate, factors out that SMS textual content messages effectively no longer have a character restrict, in view that long messages are despatched as a collection of texts on characteristic telephones (and aren’t damaged down into one hundred sixty characters on smartphones at all). in the first quarter of final 12 months, 4.6 million customers had been stated to be SMS-most effective, largely in rising markets like Brazil in India. Twitter at present studies 320 million active customers total.

Upon finding out of the rumor, Twitter users did what they always do: They tweeted. Some expressed outrage, others sarcasm. lots of individuals made jokes. a few even posed considerate questions and shared insights with out being snarky or mad! listed below are one of the best responses from users, doled out 140 characters at a time…for now:

update: Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted this partial clarification on the ten,000 character rumor, saying that the provider “will never lose” the “creativity and brevity” enabled by the one hundred forty-personality limit. however, he added, the corporate has observed users posting screenshots of blocks of text to get around the personality limit and is considering letting such blocks turn into searchable and easily highlighted by using allowing users to publish exact textual content, rather than images of textual content. He also expressed his admiration for tweet storms. Dorsey said all of this and more, satirically enough, in a screenshot.

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