After months of speculation suggesting Twitter (NYSE: TWTR) was planning to abandon its self-imposed limit of 140 characters, the company has decided to stick with the per-tweet character limit. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey stated so Monday in an interview with NBC’s Today Show.
Asked about the 140-character restriction, Dorsey said, "It’s a good constraint for us and it allows for of-the-moment brevity."
Dorsey was actually to blame for part of this speculation, tweeting out a longer message than usual by posting a screenshot of text. The suggestion then being Twitter was exploring the idea and experimenting with implementation.
Twitter chose 140 characters so that a tweet could fit into a single SMS message. But that’s now no longer necessary. However, ditching the character limit now would turn Twitter into something less than unique and more conventional, like other social media sites.
Twitter stock hesitated early Tuesday morning, letting go of 5.5 cents to $16.835 U.S., in the lower echelons of a 52-week trading range of $13.91 to $53.49 U.S.
