Twitter Blue relaunches, Musk plans to increase maximum tweet length to 4,000 characters

Early in its life, Twitter was defined by its 140-character limit (an artifact of support for SMS as a means of distributing tweets). This was increased to 280 characters five years ago and the cap will go even higher – probably for a price.

It’s part of the Twitter Blue relaunch, which is expected to include multiple tick colors. The familiar blue checkmark will appear for accounts that have gone through a review process (the details of which are unclear). Then there will be gold checkmarks for companies and gray checkmarks for officials and organizations.

The blue tick (which is the one that matters to individuals) will give users early access to new features, longer videos at up to 1080p resolution, for example. It’s not clear when the new features will be released, we only know that the edit tweets option will be available from day one.

The latest development is that in the near future, Twitter will increase the maximum tweet length to 4,000 characters. Given the frequency of Twitter threads, this might be a good change (threads aren’t the most readable way to present information). However, Elon Musk’s terse response when asked about this change does not reveal whether it will be exclusive to Twitter Blue followers or not.

This would definitely be a way to get people to sign up for the $8 per month subscription for Blue. And that’s if you go through the website, Twitter for iOS will charge you $11 per month instead to offset Apple’s App Store fee (30%). By the way, Twitter Blue is not an ad-free subscription, but Blue users will only see half of the ads.

Something that might be controversial is that accounts with Twitter Blue will have priority when listing mentions and search results. In other words, if you want your content seen by more people, you have to pay the piper.

Source | Going through