The CEO's tweet was a screenshot of a large wall of text, where he reckons with the value of the current word limit while also admitting that certain service users have to resort to posting screenshots of large blocks of text, much like Dorsey himself, to convey their point, which couldn't be done with the existing word limit without resorting to multiple tweets. Dorsey hinted at building additional functionality into the service if there is a need for it, and that if the Company decides to go down that road it will alert the developers well in advance.
According to the origin of the rumour - WSJ, Twitter is considering moving to a 10,000 character limit but in a way that fits in with the current format of Twitter. Tweets will still basically be 140 characters but any additional characters will be hidden and will require expanding to be made visible.
The Company on the hand seems to be out of touch with its users. While users have been clamouring for ways to reduce online harassment, the Company has been adding new features users never asked for or dislikes.
The 140 character limit has been initially introduced to be able to fit the tweet in an SMS along with other content such as user names, as back then Twitter would optionally SMS tweets to you if you got any replies or messages. Since then the Company has stuck around and become the biggest differentiating factor of the service. It has encouraged creativity on the part of the users, which has resulted in an amazing collection of tweets over the years.
Increasing the character limit to 200-250 would have been a welcome change, but if the 10,000 character figure is true, you'd soon be seeing lengthy blog posts on Twitter. This deviates from the essence of the platform and makes it no different from Facebook or anything else. Whatever the case maybe, its like the management at Twitter is either too blind or too obsessed with taking over Facebook to care about what the actual user want.
No comments:
Write comments