Twitter Giving Us More Characters to Tweet With

Twitter…

Usually when it comes to introducing change and fine-tuning an already well-oiled machine, little and often is the sentiment called on by many cautious individuals, but unlike ‘the norms’ social media giants like Twitter have their own way of doing things and as previous developments imply they don’t do things by halves.

Once a minor annoyance, particularly when going on those long and drawn out personal rants that are so common in the social media sphere, Twitter’s 140-character limit is changing. The generous folks at Twitter are in fact giving us another 9,860 characters to play with, but why the big change?

New Year, new features…

Whilst we have been celebrating Christmas and New Year, and all the trimmings that come with it, Twitter has been busy building a brand new feature to make tweeting our longer ramblings a reality. According to the social media platform, the traditional 140 character limit will soon be no more and the new 10,000 character limit could hit our screens as early as the end of March.

The new limit falls in line with the character limit used on their direct messaging feature so for social media specialists like ourselves the increase isn’t a completely jaw dropping advancement. Leading the development is a team affectionately known as ‘Beyond 140’, whilst it’s apparent that interim CEO Jack Dorsey is keen to leave his mark on the company with his latest brainchild.

What else will change?

The upgrade in characters may seem an easy feature to incorporate, however from a functionality point of view the development comes with a whole host of issues, many of which the guys at Twitter will ironing out in the run up to the big launch. The feature itself has been in this testing phase since September 2015 with concerns about its design topping the list. The increased character limit will after all need to be user friendly and not compromise the clear and understated design that the platform has become known and loved for. Tweets will of course be bigger but as past changes have proven bigger tweets with more content or even bigger images have impacted heavily on user engagement, a problem Twitter is keen to avoid.

Changing the platform’s most established feature may seem like a risky move, but is it a move in the right direction for Twitter and will extending the limit to the overindulgent 10,000 characters lure in the new users that the social media giant wants? Only time will tell we suppose!