Jack Dorsey totally promises Twitter's 140 character limit is here to stay
Reports of the demise of Twitter's 140-character limit have been greatly exaggerated, according to the company's CEO.
"It's staying," Jack Dorsey, Twitter's CEO and co-founder, said in an interview with the Today Show on Friday, marking his clearest denial yet on the issue.
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"It's a good constraint for us," he continued in the interview, pegged to the 10th anniversary of Twitter next week. "It allows for of-the-moment brevity."
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Before you feel too soothed by Dorsey's reassurances on the matter, remember this is the same person who strongly implied last month that Twitter would not "reorder timelines next week," in response to a report that the social network would introduce an algorithmic news feed.
Days later, Twitter began rolling out an algorithm that reordered just the top of users' timelines. It was not nearly as bad users had feared, but one could be forgiven for thinking Dorsey's statements to be misleading.
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As with Dorsey's attempt to defuse algorithmgate, his latest statement on the character limit may simply come down to semantics.
Most industry watchers I've spoken with expect Twitter will continue to display only the first 140 characters in the feed, but then give users the option to expand the tweet with an embeddable card that would display additional text when clicked. That extra text would also be searchable, unlike the many screengrabs of text that Twitter users currently rely on for moving beyond the 140 character limit.
Dorsey himself demonstrated the need for such a feature with his response to the first wave of rumors about changing the character limit in January. He stopped short, however, of clearly denying the end of 140.
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Ever since Dorsey returned as CEO last year, he has pushed for Twitter to reconsider its fundamentals -- from the 140-character limit to the reverse-chronological nature of the news feed -- in an effort to make the social network more appealing to new users and boost the company's stalled growth.
During the interview with the Today Show, Dorsey addressed lingering concerns about Twitter's business, including whether the social network censors users (nope) and whether it will still exist on the 15th anniversary. "We'll be here on the 30th," he said.
Perhaps most shocking of all, Dorsey revealed that he has never blocked a user on Twitter, despite getting "some nastiness."
"I've never blocked anyone," he said. "I really want to see what people are saying and I want to hear from them."
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Seth Fiegerman was a Senior Business Reporter at Mashable, where he covered startups, marketing and the latest consumer tech trends. He joined Mashable in August 2012 and is based in New York.Before joining Mashable, Seth covered all things Apple as a reporter at Silicon Alley Insider, the tech section of Business Insider. He has also worked as a staff writer at TheStreet.com and as an editor at Playboy Magazine. His work has appeared in Newsweek, NPR, Kiplinger, Portfolio and The Huffington Post.Seth received his Bachelor of Arts from New York University, where he majored in journalism and philosophy.In his spare time, Seth enjoys bike riding around Brooklyn and writing really bad folk songs.
