Twitter put microblogging on the map, with its 140-character limit — later bumped to 280 — spawning some real creativity online. That said, not every opinion or thought is best kept to a handful of sentences. In the past, Twitter users have turned to threads for expanding on ideas, connecting dozens of tweets into one long series. It looks like the days of relying on threads might be numbered, as the company confirmed it's working on bringing out-and-out blogging to its platform.

Hours after rumors of an expansion beyond 280 words started to appear online, Twitter announced Notes, a brand new feature currently in testing with a select group of writers. The idea behind Notes is simple: with newsletters now more popular than ever, pivoting into full-on blogging — while keeping the 280-character limit for the bulk of the site — should bring a new audience to Twitter without shedding what makes it unique in the first place.

Once Notes is rolled out to a broader audience, you'll be able to select "Write" from the sidebar, which should appear between Messages and Bookmarks once it's live. Thanks to Twitter's testing group, a handful of Notes are already live on the site, giving us a look at exactly what this blogging platform will look like when it's finished. Each Note is tied to your Twitter account, with your handle and username filling in for the usual byline. It supports photos, embedded tweets, paragraphs, text formatting (like bold and italics), and more, bringing it in line with the likes of WordPress and other blogging platforms. And, naturally, once you've published a Note from your account, you can add it to a normal tweet to draw eyes right to your new project.

As part of today's announcement, Twitter also rebranded Revue — the newsletter platform it bought last year — to Twitter Write, using this particular account to confirm the feature. It's not detailed right now, but it's easy to imagine Notes becoming a way for writers to monetize their content, not unlike how Substack works at the moment. It's just one of the questions surrounding this feature, which is clearly still in its earliest days.