Photograph by Brian Harkin/Getty Images. 
 
 Almost a year ago, I proposed that Twitter double its character limit from 140 to 280. The microblogging site long ago outgrew its original purpose as a platform for simple status updates. Now people use Twitter for news, jokes, conversations, and ferocious arguments—and 140 characters is too cramped for all of these things. That’s why people often resort to hacks like multipart tweets, ugly textese, and TwitLonger to express their expansive thoughts. Though it would be a bad idea to drop the character limit entirely, allowing up to 280 characters would let people add more heft to their tweets while ensuring they wouldn’t drone on. 
 
 Farhad Manjoo Farhad Manjoo is a technology columnist for the Wall Street Journal and the author of True Enough. 
 
 
 
 Everyone thought I was nuts. People at the company pointed out that the service is still used by lots of folks who rely on SMS text messaging for access; the 140-character limit was originally chosen so that tweets would fit within texts, and if Twitter dropped it, texters wouldn’t be able to see the bigger tweets. 
 
 Lots of folks on Twitter called me a moron, too, and I had a long, mostly incoherent argument about the merits of longer tweets with Mathew Ingram, a blogger at GigaOm, who wrote a piece calling my idea “dumb.” (On Twitter, I tried to tell Ingram that his article was equally dumb for suggesting that I was proposing unlimited-character tweets rather than 280-character tweets, but of course Twitter’s dumb character limit made the whole argument dumb.) And not long ago, I went to a dinner at which Twitter CEO Dick Costolo talked about the bad advice people had given the company over the years. One of his examples was the recurrent proposal to drop the character limit. The audience laughed and laughed at the stupidity of the idea. 
 
 
 
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 Imagine my surprise, then, when I read last week that Twitter is beginning to push past the sacrosanct 140. In a blog post, the company announced the creation of “expanded tweets,” which will allow for “interactive experiences” within boring old text-laden posts. Technically, all tweets can still be only 140 characters long. But the company is letting select organizations—including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, BuzzFeed, TMZ, and the WWE—append more stuff to tweets that reference their content. 
 
 For instance, if I link to an article from the Times, my followers will now see a little button on the tweet labeled “View summary.” If you click that, you’ll see hundreds more characters: The article’s headline, the author’s byline and Twitter handle, the publication’s Twitter handle, a photo from the piece, and even a short snippet from the article. Here’s what an expanded tweet will look like: 
 
 How many characters is all that? Twitter has posted guidelines for sites looking to create these in-tweet “media experiences,” and they specify exactly how much more expansive the new tweets can be. Headlines in supersized tweets can be 70 characters long. Snippets can be 200 characters long. And that’s on top of the main tweet, which can be 140 characters long. Add it all up and you get 410 characters! I can already picture the billboard. Expanded Tweets—fortified with 270 more characters! 
 
 But I kid. I think expanded tweets are a great development for Twitter, a way to add depth to the service while still clinging to its hyperabridged roots. In truth, expanded tweets have been around for a while—if you include a picture or a video as part of a Twitter message, then your followers can click to see it. This continued tweet expansion was inevitable. A shrinking percentage of Twitter’s userbase accesses the site through SMS, so the 140-character limit was becoming increasingly arbitrary (SMS users will still see all Tweets, but they won’t be able to see the expanded summaries). Instead, most of us get our tweets on the Web and on smartphones, venues that allow for richer content. 
 
 As expanded tweets roll out to all users on all devices, we’ll find that posts which pack 410 characters worth of information will make the network a deeper, more coherent source of news and conversation. 
 
 For one thing, expanded tweets will make Twitter feel less disjointed. Today, if you see a friend linking to an article of mine with a note, “Greatest article ever!!!!!” you might accidentally click on the story without knowing it’s another dumb Farhad Manjoo piece. Expanded tweets will let you see what’s behind links before you click on them. They’ll also let you follow your favorite writers right from tweets that link to their pieces. And as Twitter adds similar expansive summaries of other kinds of content—perhaps you’ll be able to see reviews when someone links to an Amazon product, or maybe Twitter will let me quote a 200-word summary of an article when I link to it—the experience will become more engaging. Twitter won’t be a place that’s always sending you away to other things. Instead, it will become a destination. 
 
 One criticism of expanded tweets is that Twitter has only allowed a few organizations to get expansive. Why do links to the New York Times get expanded but not links to your favorite Ryan Gosling-themed Tumblr? As blogger Dave Winer put it, “no one should think that this is a level playing field, that all content is treated equally, because that is not true.” 
 
 In a conversation with a Twitter spokeswoman, though, I got the sense that the preferential treatment is only temporary, part of a slow rollout of a complex technical change. At the moment, Twitter is letting any site apply to have its content show up as expanded summaries. Over time, it seems likely that more and more sites will be allowed to automatically expand into summaries within tweets. So not long from now, when someone links to a post from Is Ryan Gosling Cuter Than a Puppy?, you’ll be able to see both Ryan and the puppy right in the tweet, and perhaps even cast your vote there, too. 
 
 A bigger-picture criticism is that, by offering more and more stuff within each tweet, Twitter risks becoming something altogether different from a quick-update site. This fear rests on the idea that there’s something mystical and poetic about the current character limit. Many people argue that it inspires creativity, and that without it, Twitter would get bogged down in endless talk and too many flashy things. Costolo himself has fretted about this. In an interview with Fortune last year, the CEO was asked whether he felt pressure to make Twitter more dynamic in response to other, more feature-rich social networks. “You know, if you just look in the sideview mirror at what are particular companies doing, and then you start to say, ‘Twitter is going to be the world in your pocket—now with video chat!’—then you lose your way, right?" Costolo said. "So, we're going to offer simplicity in a world of complexity, focus on our goal, while we understand what everyone else is doing." 
 
 Expanding tweets isn’t quite the same thing as adding video chat to Twitter—but it’s moving in that direction. The cynical view is that Costolo is rolling out expanded tweets for commercial reasons. In the same way that the new feature will show you a snippet from a new article, supersized tweets would let McDonald’s offer you an in-tweet coupon for super-sized fries. ||||| Twitter today is announcing the launch of a new feature that will allow people to more easily post tweetstorms – that is, those series of connected tweets that have grown to become a popular workaround for getting past Twitter’s character count limitation in order to share longer thoughts. The company confirmed last month it was testing the feature – which it’s now calling “threads” – across its iOS and Android apps. 
 
 The tweetstorm format has been used for a long time on Twitter, initially by a small number of early adopters, including a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen, who would often pen the equivalent of blog posts using tweets. 
 
 The need for tweetstorms became more pressing over the years, as users continually bumped up against Twitter’s 140 character count limit – a restriction Twitter recently doubled, ahead of today’s launch. 
 
 Users have adopted the tweetstorm for a number of reasons – to tell personal, suspenseful or funny stories via Twitter, to connect facts surrounding breaking news, to rant about politics or other issues, or even to just make a longer post more readable and easier to follow. 
 
 There are now hundreds of thousands of threads tweeted out every day, notes Twitter. 
 
 Despite Twitter’s new character limit of 280, tweetstorms remain in use. The feature has essentially become a Twitter convention at this point – and the company has a history of taking inspiration from its user base in developing new features. The @reply, the hashtag, and the RT were all launched as official products based on patterns of user behavior, for example. Now the same thing is happening with threads. 
 
 The threads feature itself is easy enough to use. There’s now a new plus (“+”) button in the composer screen where you can type out your series of tweets. 
 
 Each line represents one tweet, with a character limit of 280 as per usual. You can also add the same amount of media – like GIFs, images, videos, and more – to any individual tweet in the thread, as you could on Twitter directly. When you’re finished with one tweet, you just tap in the space below to continue your thread. 
 
 While writing out your tweetstorm, you can go back and edit the tweets at any time as they’re still in draft format. When you’re ready to post, you tap the “Tweet all” button at the top to send the stream to Twitter. (Twitter will pace the tweets’ posting a bit so they don’t all hit at once.) 
 
 In addition, another handy feature allows you to go back and update a thread by adding new tweets after it already posted. To do so, you’ll write out the new tweet after tapping the “Add another Tweet” button. This lets you continue to update a thread forever – something Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey already does with his own threads, for example. 
 
 Twitter tells us there’s currently a limit of 25 entries in a thread, but that number may be subject to change depending on how the feature is adopted by the wider user base. 
 
 The company is also responding to users’ concerns that by making tweetstorms more accessible to people, the Twitter timeline will become cluttered with longer posts that slow down users’ ability to quickly scan through posts, the way you can now. It says that a thread from someone with two or three tweets will appear in your timeline connected by a line to distinguish it, but when there are four or more tweets, the thread is truncated. 
 
 In that case, you’ll see an option to “Show this thread.” If you click or tap on this message, the full thread will expand. This allows users to share their longer tweetstorms, but without taking over your timeline in the process. 
 
 Twitter says threads will begin rolling out today to everyone on iOS, Android and the web, to reach the full user base over a few weeks’ time.
– Twitter's 140-character limit is all but sancrosanct, as Slate's Farhad Manjoo discovered a while back when he suggested doubling it. Diehards were horrified, and company honchos ridiculed the notion. But what's this? Twitter has just unveiled "expanded tweets" that allow a lot more characters and "interactive experiences" in tweets that link to material at certain partner sites—the New York Times, BuzzFeed, and TMZ to name a few, but expect the list to grow. (Manjoo's piece at Slate shows an example of what one of these looks like.) Add up all those extras, and "expanded tweets" come in at up to 410 characters, even if the original technically remains 140 or less. Blasphemy? Nope, these "are a great development for Twitter, a way to add depth to the service while still clinging to its hyperabridged roots," writes Manjoo. Tiny text blocks just don't cut it anymore given all the photos, videos, songs, blogs, etc., out there. "Twitter’s purpose is to reflect everything that’s going on in this crazy ecosystem. If it takes a few hundred more characters to do so, what’s so bad about that?" Read the full piece here.