Twitter is working on a new format that will allow tweets of longer than 140 characters.
The company is responding to many users who felt constrained by the length limit, said a new report from Re/code, citing multiple people familiar with the company’s plans.
At the same time, the character limit has been a defining trait of the microblogging site since it came into existence. The discussion of whether or not to extend the limit has been debated within the company many times, but has been raised again by interim CEO Jack Dorsey.
One quote from the Re/code piece is especially telling:
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“People have been very precious at Twitter about what Twitter can be and how much it can be evolved,” said one current senior employee. “Having Jack come in and say it’s okay makes all the difference in the world.”
Twitter has been under great pressure to better communicate the usefulness of its service to more people as advertisers ask for more reach on the platform. The addition of a new longer-form format might make the service seem more accessible to people who are used to Facebook.
Twitter has also been discussing the idea of no longer counting the characters in links and hashtags toward the 140-character total, giving tweeters more room to write, the report said.
