After much public debilitation and twittering, the verdict is out – the 140 character-limit is here to stay. Jack Dorsey stated that this limit was too big a part of Twitter’s identity to let go. “It allows for of-the moment brevity”, he commented. Expanding the character limit might have helped expanding Twitter’s audience, but it also could have potentially undermined the real-time, quick and free-flowing culture of the network. The month of March marks Twitter’s 10th Anniversary. On March 21, 2006, Dorsey tweeted the network’s first tweet, “Just setting up my twttr.” “Twitter’s always been about controls, people can follow whoever they want. And it’s our job to make sure they see the most important things and the things that matter to them,” Dorsey said. “There are tweets that promote violence, which is against our terms of service, so people have controls to block and people have controls to mute.” There is a never-ending goal to get more and more people to sign up on Twitter. The biggest challenge the site faces is to maintain a culture of free speech while curbing harassment and infringement of Twitter’s policies by external groups. New features such as the digest-like ‘Moments’, which helps stream line the constant flow of information and a recently added option to use algorithms to choose the order of tweets in user timelines aim to make Twitter easier to use.
