Remember when tweets were limited to just 140 characters? Now, regular tweets are double that, and Twitter Blue users can post even longer tweets up to 4,000 characters. So why did Twitter limit us so much for most of its history?

The History of The 140 Twitter Character Limit

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The original character limit was implemented because Twitter started out via SMS. At the time, SMS carriers had a cap of 160 characters on each message, but Twitter reserved 20 characters for usernames. That's why tweets were limited to 140 characters.

But hold on. There’s more to the story!

The idea for the micro-blogging service came from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s fascination with how a city functions in real-time. He mapped the city’s support systems—from emergency services to vehicle dispatches—through the lens of the Web.

And guess what that gave him? A rich picture of a city in motion. But there was something missing from the picture: people, the one element that made the city come alive.

Dorsey's idea of creating a type of digital dispatch service gained momentum when he signed up for a LiveJournal account in 2000. From that point, it was a matter of finding the right medium, and that medium happened to be the humble SMS protocol, which in turn brought the 140-character limit.

How Twitter Got Longer Tweets

Twitter upped its character limit to 280 in 2017 in an effort to regain popularity at a time when its users were slipping.

Since then, the company also tested and launched Twitter Notes, a tool for posting even longer pieces of text to the platform, in 2022. In 2023, Twitter also announced that Twitter Blue subscribers can tweet up to 4,000 characters in a feature called Longer Tweets.

How Long Do You Think Tweets Should Be?

So do you think the 140-character limit was a good thing, or do you think the new limits are better? Should Twitter let people send out longer tweets without having to use third-party services?

Twitter will probably continue to change how we can tweet in the years ahead. It will be interesting to see if longer tweets create better tweets, or if we will possibly return to Twitter's short-form roots.