Twitter CEO shares some mock-ups of longer tweets

A new article on Social Media Today reports that Elon Musk has repeatedly noted his desire to build YouTube-like features into the app, enabling users to post longer video, in order to keep viewers from clicking across to another app to consume video content (and provide another monetization opportunity for creators). Longer text is another area of focus, with Musk also telling users that longer tweets - potentially up to 4,000 characters - are coming soon.



So how would that work?

Short-form text has been a foundational element of Twitter, so you can't just suddenly switch to walls of text dominating the tweet feed, right? Recently, Twitter designer Andrea Conway shared some mock-ups of how longer tweets may look in-stream, and how the process could work, if/when implemented.



As you can see in this example, longer tweets would likely appear in-stream at the regular tweet length, with a 'Show more' indicator at the end of the first 280 characters. Users could then expand the tweet to read more, with potentially the full 4,000 characters then displayed in a longer tweet panel.

That would enable Twitter to provide more room to share longer thoughts, without interrupting the tweet stream too much. But then again, it does also seem like the only way to reduce that massive tweet panel again would be to scroll down to the bottom of the expanded tweet - and if the character limit is indeed increased to 4k, that could be a lot of annoying scrolling just to find out what's hidden behind that 'Show more' marker.

Twitter could solve for this by providing more info on exactly how much longer the full tweet goes. It's experimenting with a similar notification for tweet creators, noting that only the first 280 characters will be displayed for their longer tweets.