SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Twitter appears ready to loosen its decade-old restriction on the length of messages in a bid to make its service more appealing to a wider audience accustomed to the greater freedom offered by Facebook and other forums. CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey telegraphed Twitter's intentions in a tweet posted Tuesday after the technology news site Re/Code reported the company is exploring increasing its limits on text from 140 characters to as many as 10,000. [...] he needs to respond to company shareholders pining for a bigger audience that would generate more advertising revenue. After a long streak of robust growth that turned it into one of the Internet's hottest companies, Twitter's growth has slowed dramatically during the past year-and-half to leave it scrambling to catch up with social networking leader Facebook and its 1.5 billion users. Twitter's malaise resulted in the departure of Dick Costolo as the company's CEO last July and ushered in the return of Dorsey, who had been ousted as the company's leader in 2008.