Twitter goes from 140 to 10 000 characters!

Thursday, January 14, 2016

On January 5th, one of Twitter's co-founders (Jack Dorsey) announced that they are working on increasing the limit to 10 000 characters. This change should take effect in about 3 months.

Brief history for those who don't know Twitter

Twitter is a social network that's been online since 2006. What distinguishes it from the other social networks is its limit of 140 characters, as well as the use of hashtags (#) and abreviations. Initially, Twitter was supposed to be used to replace the use of SMS (it used to be more expansive in its early days).

Why make this change?

Lots of users think this major change is a last-ditch effort because the company is losing popularity and its userbase isn't climbing as fast as it used to. There's a large amount of inactive accounts and there are more and more social networks they need to compete with. This change might represent, in the eyes of Twitter's administration, something that allows Twitter to re-gain its momentum (and increase its value on the stock market).

It's also possible that Twitter is trying to keep its users on its website longer. By allowing people to write longer messages, readers won't have to leave Twitter's website to go see the rest of the content, which is a good idea when trying to sell ads.

This update might also attract a larger userbase of people who don't quite understand how to use Twitter and aren't comfortable with the 140 character limit.

The removal of the 140 character limit marks the end of an era at Twitter, something that distinguished it from all the other social networks. You can bet its current users aren't going to be happy about that.

Only time will tell if this was a good move or not.

In the meanwhile, Le Robert has found a way to profit on this announcement by inviting us to improve on our French.