Twitter announced that they would be expanding the character limit to 10,000 characters per tweet, effectively removing the limit.

The feature is planned to be released by the end of the first quarter, but both the character limit and launch date may change as Twitter considers how to roll out the change. One proposed method is only displaying the first 140 characters, but including a “read more” link to display the whole tweet.

Back in October, there was talk of removing the character limit on Twitter, something they had already done for private messages. The reason for doing so would be to appeal to a wider audience of users. Not only is Twitter’s footprint on the Internet considerably lower than other social media sites – it’s 23 percent of Web users pales in comparison to the 72 percent for Facebook – but furthermore, Twitter’s growth has plateaued since last year,