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Although born out of necessity dating back to its SMS-based origins, Twitter's 140-character message limit has become a defining aspect of the service and remained in place long after the technological limitations were nullified. Based on new reports this week, however, that may soon change.

Re/code's Kurt Wagner first reported Tuesday that Twitter is considering significantly upgrading the 140-character limit for public tweets to a much larger 10,000-character limit, the same that the company introduced for direct messages last August. The move, referred to internally as 'Beyond 140,' is reportedly still in testing, and may roll out as a series of incremental increases in character limit before ultimately hitting 10,000.

To avoid making the service unwieldy, sources suggest that Twitter's main interface will still only display the first 140 characters of text for each message, with users able to click to expand longer messages in order to see the complete text.

While Twitter has not commented officially on the reports, co-founder Jack Dorsey, who returned to the company as CEO in October, tweeted a lengthy block of text -- in image form -- late Tuesday, with a message that seemingly confirms the rumors.

We've spent a lot of time observing what people are doing on Twitter, and we see them taking screenshots of text and tweeting it. Instead, what if that text..was actually text? Text that could be searched. Text that could be highlighted. That's more utility and power..
We're not going to be shy about building more utility and power into Twitter for people. As long as it's consistent with what people want to do, we're going to explore it.

Although still popular, Twitter has struggled to grow both its user base and revenue under multiple CEOs, and recent changes to the service such as the introduction of 'Moments' and 'Likes' haven't taken hold. While workarounds for the 140-character limit already exist, Twitter's plans to give users more flexibility with their tweets may return some excitement to the service.

Longtime Twitter users may be more hesitant about the change, however, as the current character limit requires tweets to be succinct, and makes the platform unique among today's social communication services. The move to a 10,000 character limit may also introduce concerns about spamming and abuse, and it's not yet clear how Twitter may handle such situations.

Twitter is getting serious about messaging today. The social network has begun rolling out updates to its iOS, Mac, and Android apps, in addition to TweetDeck and its website, that remove the long-existing 140 character limit from individual direct messages. This change will roll out over the course of the next few weeks, so all users may not see the change immediately. The old 140 character limit for messages will remain for Tweets sent publicly and direct messages sent via SMS.

Twitter first announced its intention to drop the 140 character limit in a blog post in June. Since the beginning of the summer, Twitter has been working on several enhancements to its service as it searches for a new full-time CEO to replace Dick Costolo. The company has been working on new ways to integrate news stories into its app by way of a new Project Lightning initiative. The company has also been seeding frequent software and over-the-air updates to its apps, including the recent addition of landscape support on the iPhone 6 Plus.

Twitter’s full blog post regarding the DM character limit change can be found below:

It’s truly the best between modern convenience and Old school.

If you’ve checked your Direct Messages today, you may have noticed that something’s missing: the limitation of 140 characters. You can now chat on (and on) in a single Direct Message, and likely still have some characters left over.

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While Twitter is largely a public experience, Direct Messages let you have private conversations about the memes, news, movements, and events that unfold on Twitter. Each of the hundreds of millions of Tweets sent across Twitter every day is an opportunity for you to spark a conversation about what’s happening in your world. That’s why we’ve made a number of changes to Direct Messages over the last few months. Today’s change is another big step towards making the private side of Twitter even more powerful and fun.

You may be wondering what this means for the public side of Twitter. In a word, nothing. Tweets will continue to be the 140 characters they are today, rich with commentary as well as photos, videos, links, Vines, gifs, and emoji. So, start working on those sonnets.

We’ll begin rolling out this change today across our Android and iOS apps, on twitter.com, TweetDeck, and Twitter for Mac. It will continue to roll out worldwide over the next few weeks. If you can’t wait to try out longer Direct Messages, be sure you’re using the latest versions of our apps so you get the update right away. Sending and receiving Direct Messages via SMS will still be limited.

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