Twitter's #longtweets aims to make sure you never need to leave

Drastically increasing the character limit on tweets may have nothing to do with allowing ordinary users to say more and everything to do with getting publishers to produce native content

On Tuesday, Twitter's co-founder and chief executive, Jack Dorsey, made the strongest hint yet that his company is considering dropping the 140-character limit for tweets, after reports that the firm had been testing an alternative product with the ability to send messages of up to 10,000 characters.

The tweet, which came after a report from technology site Recode that "longer tweets are coming soon to Twitter", drew criticism on the site. Some users warned they would leave if it was implemented, while others expressed fear that the spirit of Twitter would be corrupted by users having the ability to post screeds of text.