Will Twitter eliminate its 140-character post limit?

March 2015

Dave Winer has wanted to Twitter to remove the 140-character barrier for a long while now. I can't recall anyone else expressing this sentiment for so long. I simply have not noticed a lot of outrage about the 140-char limit over the past couple years.

Dave made a couple posts recently:

• Mar 15 - A Medium-size hole in Twitter
• Mar 16 - When will the 140-char wall come down?

It seems that Twitter ceases to be Twitter if it allows text posts of any size.

What would the UI/UX be if Twitter removed its 140-char limit? Would the entire post appear in the feed, or would only a snippet be displayed along with a "read more" type of link?

What would users think about this? At the moment, users can read all of the content by viewing only the stream or feed of posts. Will users want to click "read more" links to view long tweets?

The 140-char limit can be circumvented now by writing the lengthy post elsewhere, like at Blogger, Medium, Tumblr, Wordpress, Ghost, one's own domain, etc., and then copying the link for the long post and pasting it into a tweet. Users can click that type of "read more" link now. I don't understand why this is so hard to accept.

Actually, it's already accepted by a lot of Twitter users who post links in their tweets that point to longer posts.

I think a lot of users would be irritated by long posts on a service that has forced users to be concise since 2006.

On a side note, I access Dave Winer's blog posts for updates than any other site. For a long time, I've admired his work for the web, and I'm glad that he's still hacking. I don't always agree with his viewpoints, but that's good because I like challenges.

I currently disagree with his trend toward heavy client-side JavaScript work for his Live Blog content, especially as sounds the horn for supporting the open web.

His new content app(s) violate or break basic web functions:

• highlighting and copying text occurs in an abnormal way. I cannot simply copy the title for a post.
• the back button is broken