Microblogging come messaging service Twitter, Inc. may be due for a radical shakeup with the company reported to be preparing to lift its 140-character limit.

The Wall Street Journal quotes the proverbial “person familiar with the matter” as saying that company would lift the 140-character limit to as many as 10,000 characters, but is aiming to retain the look and feel of the current user timeline with tweets longer than 140 characters requiring users to click and expand to see the rest of the text.

The same report also claims that as users write beyond the 140-character limit, the Twitter interface they are using will tell them that they have crossed the limit, ostensibly to encourage brevity.

https://twitter.com/grum/status/684569942679670786

Although Twitter has yet to officially confirm the move to lift the 140-character limit, Twitter Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey sort of confirmed the news when he tweeted a screenshot of a rambling response to the reports that included some background history about the company, and if they were to change the limit, developers will be told in advance.

“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,” Dorsey wrote. “Instead, what if that text … was actually text? Text that could be searched.  Text that could be highlighted. That’s more utility and power.”

Titanic

While the 140-character limit has long been said to be somewhat arbitrarily restrictive; the restriction in and of itself is what once gave Twitter its charm, and arguably still does today.

I bet you'll be able to edit your 10k babbling bullshit!

— drew olanoff ? (@yoda) January 6, 2016

Allowing tweets of up to 10,000 characters, however, will fundamentally break Twitter’s current model while at the same time doing absolutely nothing to arrest the ongoing stagnation the company is currently suffering, which includes declining user numbers, and may even accelerate this downward trend.

It is put, quite simply, a case of rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.

That said they have to try something new, and there is one serious advantage the move will deliver: data.

Dorsey particularly refers to screenshots of text, all of it difficult to mine for data, and then refers to that same text being searchable if it was in the tweet itself without mentioning the obvious advantage for Twitter: They’ll be able to search it, collate it, package it, and sell it to those companies looking for data on what users are talking about as well.

The new 10,000-character limit on Twitter is believed to be rolling out sometime in February or March.

Image credit: kecko/Flickr/CC by 2.0