Twitter may soon ditch the 280-character limit and allow longer tweets

Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk has confirmed that he will be dropping the 280-character limit on Twitter 'soon'.  

At present it is difficult to compose a thread on Twitter in which the composer needs to separate the entire text into 280-character chunks. Now the company is working on a solution to turn long-form text into a thread automatically. 

According to a tweet posted by app researcher Jane Manchun Wong, twitter’s composer will automatically break the text into a thread when it crosses the 280-character limit. 

She explained in a reply to query that Twitter wants to reduce the friction of creating threads. Currently, users need to hit the + button to add a tweet to a thread and post the next set of 280 characters — which can be very annoying when you are trying out a thought or pasting info from another document. 

Musk too replied to the tweet of users curious on this matter. “Ability to do long tweets coming soon,” he tweeted. 

Musk, who has acquired Twitter for $44 billion last month after a bitter battle, said in April this year that the micro-blogging platform needs long-form tweets which is "way overdue". 

"My most immediate takeaway from this novella of a thread is that Twitter is way overdue for long form tweets!," Musk said reacting to a follower's tweet thread.

At the end of October, responding to another user who asked if we can get rid of character limits, or at least greatly expand it, Musk said: "Absolutely".

The company first announced its plan to move beyond its traditional 140 characters in September 2017 with a small group of users. 

Since taking over Twitter, Elon Musk has fired top executives, laid off hundreds of employees and launched and rolled back a number of features. For example, Musk demanded an Edit button, and the company announced that it is working on such a feature that will allow users to correct errors in their tweets. He has also laid off 50% of Twitter workforce, or about 3,800 employees, and nearly 5,000 contractual workers at the company.
Musk has also earned a reputation as a demanding boss, working long hours and expecting his employees to do the same. 

More recently, on Tuesday, Twitter said it started working on end-to-end encryption for direct messages (DMs) on Android. 

Wong tweeted: “Twitter is bringing back end-to-end encrypted DMs.” 

A picture of the code strings highlighting references to encryption keys was attached to Wong’s post. Elon Musk replied to Wong’s tweet with a winking emoji, which indicates that the feature is in development.