Kurt Wagner, writing for re/code:

Twitter is building a new feature that will allow users to tweet things longer than the traditional 140-character limit, and the company is targeting a launch date toward the end of Q1, according to multiple sources familiar with the company’s plans. Twitter is currently considering a 10,000 character limit, according to these sources. That’s the same character limit the company uses for its Direct Messages product, so it isn’t a complete surprise.

There is no official launch date set in stone, these sources say. It’s also possible the character limit could fluctuate before it rolls out the final product, which people inside Twitter refer to as “Beyond 140.”

Jack Dorsey, one of Twitter’s founders, lent legitimacy to this rumor with this tweet.

From the tweet:

We’ve spent a lot of time observing what people are doing on Twitter, and we see them taking screenshots of text and tweeting it.

Instead, what if that text…was actually text? Text that could be searched. Text that could be highlighted. That’s more utility and power.

Because Twitter limited Jack to 140 characters, he did what lots of us do. He typed up something long, took a screenshot, then included the image in his tweet.

There’s been some speculation that Twitter’s next move is to automate this process. You type as much as you want (up to 10K characters), and Twitter will make a pretty attachment from your words.

Bu key to this change is that the text must be searchable (as Jack indicated in his tweet), something that wouldn’t be the case with a simple image attachment. Searchable text adds value to Twitter, keeps longer posters on the platform and, as an added bonus, text takes up significantly less storage space than images.

This will be an interesting change, assuming it happens.