Twitter appears ready to expand beyond 140-character tweets

By: 9 years ago

This Nov. 4, 2013, file photo shows the icon for the Twitter app on an iPhone in San Jose, California. AP

SAN FRANCISCO, United States — Twitter appears ready to loosen its decade-old restriction on the length of messages to give its users more freedom and make its service more appealing to a wider audience.

CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey telegraphed that change is coming in a tweet he posted Tuesday a few hours after the technology news site Re/Code reported Twitter is exploring increasing its limits on text from 140 characters to as many as 10,000.

Dorsey didn’t directly address the Re/Code report that cited unnamed people, but he made it clear that Twitter isn’t wedded to the 140-character limit. He made his point by posting a screenshot of a text consisting of 1,325 characters.

Twitter declined to comment on its plans.

Whatever Twitter does next, Dorsey pledged most tweets will remain “short and sweet.”