Musk has repeatedly famous his want to construct YouTube-like options into the app, enabling customers to submit longer video, with the intention to maintain viewers from clicking throughout to a different app to devour video content material (and supply one other monetization alternative for creators). Longer textual content is one other space of focus, with Musk additionally telling customers that longer tweets – probably as much as 4,000 characters – are coming quickly.

So how would that work?

Brief-form textual content has been a foundational factor of Twitter, so you possibly can’t simply instantly swap to partitions of textual content dominating the tweet feed, proper?

Not too long ago, Twitter designer Andrea Conway shared some mock-ups of how longer tweets might look in-stream, and the way the method might work, if/when carried out.

As you possibly can see on this instance, longer tweets would doubtless seem in-stream on the common tweet size, with a ‘Present extra’ indicator on the finish of the primary 280 characters. Customers might then develop the tweet to learn extra, with probably the total 4,000 characters then displayed in an extended tweet panel.

That may allow Twitter to offer extra room to share longer ideas, with out interrupting the tweet stream an excessive amount of. However then once more, it does additionally seem to be the one option to scale back that large tweet panel once more could be to scroll all the way down to the underside of the expanded tweet – and if the character restrict is certainly elevated to 4k, that may very well be loads of annoying scrolling simply to seek out out what’s hidden behind that ‘Present extra’ marker.

Twitter might remedy for this by offering extra information on precisely how for much longer the total tweet goes. It’s experimenting with an identical notification for tweet creators, noting that solely the primary 280 characters shall be displayed for his or her longer tweets.

It might equally replace the notification on the ‘Present extra’ immediate, with one thing like ‘Learn remaining 3,000 characters’ because the indicator as a substitute, which might save customers from tapping, and unspooling an enormous article inside a tweet.

That would, nevertheless, scale back the quantity of engagement with longer tweets – however then once more, not indicating the total size might, in impact, have the identical impression, as customers may get sick of increasing out large tweets and simply cease tapping the immediate both means.

It’s additionally not clear that that is one thing that customers need on Twitter, given its historic deal with short-form messaging, and it’ll be attention-grabbing to see the way it’s acquired if/when it does finally get rolled out.

Twitter’s been attempting to work out a greater option to share longer type content material for a while. Previous to the Musk takeover, Twitter had been experimenting with ‘Notes’, which enabled customers to create posts of as much as 2,500 phrases that might then be natively embedded into the Twitter app for straightforward sharing.

It appears that evidently this challenge has now been shelved, in favor, probably, of longer tweets, with the concept being that this may alleviate the necessity to ship screenshots of textual content, whereas additionally serving to Twitter increase engagement and dwell time, and host a greater diversity of content material codecs.

There’s no phrase as but on a dwell check of longer tweets, nor whether or not will probably be made obtainable to all customers or simply Twitter Blue subscribers (longer video seems to be set to be a Twitter Blue unique factor).

We’ll maintain you up to date on any progress.