To demonstrate the use case for longer text in tweets, Twitter's Jack Dorsey made the announcement via an image tweet containing a screenshot of text. Cute, but in emphasizing how inaccessible it is, he made the announcement inaccessible too! I can't find a version of the text posted publicly, so I've transcribed it here.

jack-on-long-tweets.md

Accessible version of A screenshot-tweet by Twitter's Jack Dorsey from 5 January 2016

At its core Twitter is public messaging. A simple way to say something, to anyone, that everyone in the world can see instantly.

We didn't start Twitter with a 140 character restriction. We added that early on to fit into a single SMS message (160 characters).

It's become a beautiful constraint, and I love it! It inspires creativity and brevity. And a sense of speed. We will never lose that feeling.

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.

What makes Twitter, Twitter is its fast, public, live conversational nature. We will always work to strengthen that. For every person around the world, in every language!

And by focusing on conversation and messaging, the majority of tweets will always be short and sweet and conversational!

We're not going to be shy about building more utility and power into Twitter for people. As long as it's consistent with what people want to do, we're going to explore it.

And as I said at #flight, if we decide to ship what we explore, we're telling developers well in advance, so they can prepare accordingly.

(Also: I love tweetstorms! Those won't go away.)