Twitter’s 140-character limit a ‘beautiful constraint’, will stay: CEO

Los Angeles

Amid reports that Twitter is mulling to expand its 140-character limit on tweets, the microblogging site's CEO Jack Dorsey said it is "a beautiful constraint" and staying for good.

"It's staying," said 39-year-old Dorsey when asked if the character limit - that has long frustrated and challenged its most verbose users - is staying.

"One hundred and forty characters. The limit: Is it staying? And if it's going away, when?" was the question posed to Dorsey on NBC's Today Show where he appeared to talk about Twitter's 10-year anniversary.

"It's a good constraint for us, and it allows for of-the-moment brevity," he replied.

The 140-character limit is "a beautiful constraint", he said, adding that Twitter "will never lose that feeling".

At the same time, Dorsey pointed out that users often share screenshots of text on Twitter, in part to get around the character limit, according to a report by the Tech Crunch.

When asked if he is not changing anything in Twitter, he said: "We're changing a lot. We're always going to make Twitter better."

Tech news website re/code had reported in January that Twitter has been studying how to allow users to say more, after restricting them to 140 characters for 10 years.

It said the company may offer a solution in the form of the 10,000 character tweet, which could be available as soon as March a part of Twitter's efforts to expand its user base and advertising sales and other sources of income.

The site was said to be abuzz all day with rumours of the new project, internally called 'Beyond 140', and testing a version that would still only display 140 characters in a message, but carry much more, and a reader would have to click on the tweet to see the rest. — PTI