You may have noticed Twitter is messing up API calls, fooling with historical analytics and causing login issues. Twitter is making changes. But the biggest change may be the one you haven’t noticed … yet.
Twitter may lengthen tweets by the end of first quarter, from 140 characters to 10,000 characters. The company already lengthened direct messages, which has proven a boon. Usually when people are taking things from public to private (tweet to direct message), they need more space. Now, instead of a maximum character count of 30, users can type more information in one message and cut down on the number of messages required to carry on a conversation. Anyone who used Twitter for customer service was delighted about the change.
However, I don’t think lengthening tweets is a good idea.
Twitter was founded as a micro-blogging community. The iconic 140-character tweet is enough to write one succinct thought. I have always appreciated the beauty in its simplicity. One thought. One tweet. One glance to read it. It is easy. Simple. Clean. Efficient. Unique. The amount of information you can consume by scanning your Twitter timeline is incredible.
Expanding the length changes the core of Twitter. It will no longer be a micro-blogging platform. Increasing tweet lengths would change user behavior on a fundamental level. Twitter would have a new vibe.
Ten-thousand-character tweets? Why not just make Twitter a blogging platform? Why not make it Facebook or Tumblr?
The other social networks copy each other. They have many of the same features, but with a different primary focus: Pinterest is for photos of cats, Tumblr is for photos of cats, Facebook is for memes about cats, reddit is to conspire about cat photos, and snapchat is to share pics of cats you are too embarrassed to send anywhere else.
At 140 characters, tweets contain enough information to ingest with a glance. If you want, to know more you have to engage, to click, to expand, to talk to the person, to join the conversation.
Twitter promised it is addressing potential spamming issues, like how many people can be tagged in a tweet. I wonder how the platform will address old-school black hat SEO techniques like repeating a word 100 times to gain ranking for that term.
Though clearly I am Twitter-orthodox, I am trying to keep an open mind. At this point, I will just keep my eyes open to see what changes the platform rolls out next.
