Twitter is great. But do you ever come up with fantastic tweets only to find it’s virtually impossible to fit them neatly into 140 character……
Ahem. 140 characters or less?
It’s tricky, but that’s always been part of the beauty of Twitter. If you can’t say it in so many words, then maybe you just shouldn’t say it at all.
But the gods of tweeting have deemed it necessary to give us more rope to hang ourselves with (like enough rope to hang ourselves from the Eiffel Tower – twice), and are planning to introduce a feature that will allow users to tweet things longer than the traditional 140 character limit.
According to Re/code, a very informed blog on all things Twitter, there is no official date set for the launch, but they may be aiming for a date towards the end of Q1.
But we’re not just talking about making things a little longer. This isn’t 240 characters or even 500.
According to sources, the company is currently considering making tweets up to 10,000 characters long.
If your average novel is 80,000 words, that could make a tweet an eighth as long as your favourite paperback.
And yes, we know, Twitter does take into account characters with spaces. But for scale, this article you’re reading, with spaces, is still only about 3,000 characters long. Meaning a potential tweet could still be 7,000 characters longer than this, if the changes go ahead.
Ok, it’s unlikely that people will stick to this new character limit so strictly, but even if we don’t use up all the 10k word count, there’s still a lot of scope for much more drawn-out tweets than we’re used to seeing.
Which begs the question, is Twitter about to become Facebook?
Until now, Twitter has been a safe haven from your Great Aunt’s sonnets on her grocery shopping or your ex-best friend’s annoying photos from her holiday in the Bahamas.
It’s been a place where we can find global news in bite sized chunks, see what everyone is talking about (not just deranged family members) and laugh at the witty (but short) meanderings of our favourite comics, writers, and celebrities.
So what now? Will it become overrun with the lengthy streams of consciousness that send us into unconsciousness while reading them?
Well, Re/code says that the format of Twitter will not change drastically as the design aspect is key to its popularity. In the past, when tweets have been made bigger by pictures or additional content, user engagement has diminished.
Reason being, the longer we take to read the tweets or the more space they take up on our screen, the less likely we are to view and engage with many of them. To counter that, Twitter is apparently testing ways to show tweets as they normally do, but with an option to click to expand the rest of the content that you cannot see.
Jack Dorsey, CEO of the microblogging site, tweeted a longer than normal post that hinted at the upcoming changes. In it he spoke of the 140 character limit as a “beautiful constraint” that “inspires creativity and brevity” but wondered “what if that text….was actually text?”
Twitter users have largely condemned the move towards a larger word limit, instead asking for smaller changes like an edit button, or for mentions not to be included in the count. The future suddenly looks a lot longer.
#IfItAintBrokeDontFixItTwitter
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