Twitter said to be ready to turn it up to 10,000 (characters)

Dive Brief:

Long associated with 140-character messages, Twitter may permit tweets of up to 10,000 characters by the end of the first quarter.
Co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey has been looking for ways to revitalize the platform, whose growth has stalled since a 2013 IPO.
Twitter’s user base grew just 1.3% in the third quarter of 2015, and advertising revenues were expected to slow in the fourth quarter.

Dive Insight:

A report from Re/Code says that Twitter will soon allow users to create public posts of up to 10,000 characters, similar to the person-to-person Direct Messages it introduced last July. The platform is expected to display only the first 140 characters of the new feature-length posts, asking users to click to continue reading. Co-founder Jack Dorsey explained the thought behind the change in a tweet yesterday where he wrote, "We've spend 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?" (The full tweet is below).

Since Dorsey returned to the company in July, Twitter has been aggressively updating features and rolling out new ones in an effort to stay relevant. The platform’s user base has been growing only slowly in recent years, and the company has never turned a profit. Twitter shares have lost half their value since the company went public in 2013.

Twitter’s character limit and resulting sense of immediacy are part of its brand, however, so the company is unlikely to abandon them completely. But the new 10,000-character limit, a “Buy Now” button, and the acquisitions of Vine and Periscope may help it compete with the other big tech companies for ad dollars and consumer engagement.