How Will Twitter Break the 140-Character Limit?

Dave Winer:

I had a few minutes to spare this morning and decided it would be worth it to see what a Fat Tweet might look like, one that has room for more than 140 chars, that doesn’t force you to click a link to see the rest.

Dave’s idea is that you could type as much text as you want for the tweet, but your timeline would only show the first 140 characters (preserving the scrollability of your timeline), and you’d click or tap “See More” to expand the whole thing.

I think Twitter will do something different. I think they’ll preserve the 140-character limit for the tweet itself, but add “text” or maybe something richer, like “story”, as an attachment type. So in the same way that you can now attach an image to a tweet, you could attach a chunk of text. You’d see a preview/thumbnail of the text attachment in the timeline, and you’d click/tap on it to see the whole thing.

It’d be pretty cool if they used Markdown for formatting, but that might be too nerdy for mass market use.

★ Thursday, 8 October 2015