Reports hint at live video tweeting

Twitter has said it has no plans to host video

Reports are emerging that Twitter is planning to allow users to tweet videos, but the company has denied any such suggestion.

Several reports claim that the firm is pushing ahead with plans to extend the functionality of the messaging application, which is currently limited to 140 text characters.

Some third-party web sites already let users post links to videos on their tweets, but the services are limited because adding videos to messages could prove to be a huge drain on resources.

Real-time traffic management site TweeSpeed said that approximately 12,000 tweets are sent every minute. If this is the case, adding video would require an unwanted huge amount of extra bandwidth.

A report in The Times claims that Twitter's founders are discussing plans to let users "post live video from phones, laptops or other devices, although the video will be only brief snippets".

A separate report in The Daily Telegraph added: "Twitter's founders hope that adding live video-tweeting will help boost its prominence as a fashionable social networking tool again."

Neither article cites a source for the claims.

Twitter founder Biz Stone dismissed the reports, suggesting that tweeting videos was against the firm's ethos.

"Haven't read the piece, but no video hosting. 140 characters of text including spaces. You know the drill," he said in an email to the Mashable blog.

At the time of writing, Twitter had not responded to our request for comment.