Twitter is set to announce a new 10,000-character-limit for tweets according to Luke Wilson Kurt Wagner at Re/Code, which is the same character limit per message that Twitter imposes on Direct Messages. The character limit is currently 140-characters per tweet, which has long served as Twitter’s prominent but personable beauty mark.
The design and layout of a user’s Twitter feed would remain the same according to Wagner’s sources. Instead of walls of text dominating a timeline, each tweet would initially show the first 140-characters before linking to a “See More…” expander button.
Still, the beauty of Twitter was its necessity for brevity. But returned prodigal son and current CEO Jack Dorsey seems perfectly willing to kill his darlings to get Twitter into fighting shape to tackle Facebook’s domination on the market share, and ad revenue.
Change is a delicate process for Twitter. Part of what makes Twitter so great is that the bare bones platform enables global communication between citizens in all tranches of life like nothing else does. Twitter acts as a incubator/accelerator for cultural ideas despite a smaller population than what currently resides in Facebook’s ecosystem.
To put it another way, necessity is the mother of invention. Facebook users may consume but Twitter users create, and Dorsey’s recent initiatives, which include post-event summaries called Moments, all seemed designed to drive a certain type of user-growth that Facebook has long cornered.
This isn’t Twitter’s first rodeo with tweaking their golden goose, and in the past their efforts have not been rewarded. User engagement was actually diminished in the past when Twitter attempted to make tweets bigger by adding bigger pictures.
However, the 140-character-limit is the last card that Twitter has to play, but it’s a dangerous game to play, as it is what differentiates the service on the Internet battlefield.
