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Twitter Likely Expanding 140-Character Tweet Limit With New Product

This article is more than 8 years old.

It’s 2015 and Twitter is reportedly finally doing something many assumed it wouldn’t ever do – expanding the 140 character-per-tweet limit. If true, this is a move that could fundamentally change how Twitter works, but it’s to be seen if that change would be good or bad for the company.

Re/Code has it on good authority that Twitter is set to roll out a “new product” to allow for longer tweets. That phrasing is interesting, as it indicates that Twitter won’t be completely ditching the current limit, but is also taking steps to deal with a feature that some instead view as a shortcoming.

For those not familiar with the history of the 140-character limit, we must go all the way back to 1985 when a German by the name of Friedhelm Hillebrand was working on a system to allow cell carriers to send out short text messages to their subscribers. The idea was to notify them when they were running low on minutes or their credit card didn’t clear. After some self-testing with a typewriter, Hillebrand decided somewhat arbitrarily that 160 was the “perfectly sufficient” number of characters for these short notices. He implemented this system and SMS – that many call text messaging – was born.

Twitter was developed before the world of the modern smartphone. When it was started it relied on SMS for people to send and receive messages. Thus the messages were limited to 160 characters – 20 of those for the user’s unique handle (@matthickey, for example) and 140 allotted for the actual message.

We are now many years past that, though. Most people use Twitter via apps now. A quick poll of this writer’s peers shows that he doesn’t know anyone that still uses the SMS version of twitter. And that’s likely why -- if the Re/Code sources are accurate -- Twitter is looking to move past limits placed upon it by deprecated technology.

How Twitter plans to implement whatever this new product is going to be important – the 140-character limit is part of Twitter’s identity. Taking an idea or thought, especially a complex one, and compressing it into what amounts to less than the blurbs some film posters get has become something of an art, and it would be a shame to lose that.

Still, it’s no longer 2006, sometimes those in the Twitterverse have more to say than can be said in the confines of technology invented during the Reagan administration.

It would certainly help this writer expand from haiku to dirty limericks.