Twitter Planning 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets

New York, Jan 6 (IANS) Want to convey more to your friends and policymakers on Twitter? Soon, you may be able to tweet in 10,000 characters on the micro-blogging site.

According to media reports, Twitter is building a new feature that will allow users to tweet longer than its traditional 140-character limit.

The company is currently considering a 10,000-character limit, recode.net reported, adding that Twitter may launch this feature toward the end of the first quarter.

This is the character limit the company uses for its Direct Messages product.

According to the report, it is also possible that the 10,000-character feature may change before it is finally rolled out.

There is, however, no official launch date set so far.

"Twitter is currently testing a version of the product in which tweets appear the same way they do now, displaying just 140 characters, with some kind of call to action that there is more content you can't see," recode.net said, quoting sources.

Clicking on the tweets will then expand them to reveal more content.

The 140-character limit has been around as long as Twitter has and has become part of the product's personality.

Twitter is also working on the idea of changing its reverse chronological timeline.

The micro-blogging site is experimenting with a Facebook-type way of sorting your timeline where tweets are sorted by relevance and not in reverse chronological order as it happens now.

According to motherboard.vice.com, Twitter is working with algorithms similar to the ones Facebook uses to order items on your news feed.

"This is an experiment. We're continuing to explore ways to surface the best content for people using Twitter," a company spokeswoman was quoted as saying.

Twitter has been hinting towards an algorithmic-driven news feed for more than a year.

The test is part of CEO Jack Dorsey's promise for bold changes to Twitter to help get it out of its slow growth, Wall Street Journal reported.

"You will see us continue to question our reverse chronological timeline, and all the work it takes to build one by finding and following accounts," Dorsey said earlier this year.

"We continue to show a questioning of our fundamentals in order to make the product easier and more accessible to more people," he added.

The reverse chronological timeline has been fundamental to Twitter since it began nine years ago and has made sense for a real-time service.