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Reading the 280 test page feels odd. It kills the instantaneous feel of 140chars. The 280 ones feel like engaging a different part of your brain. I think they should try to allow easier creation and reading of "thread" (when one user starts a long stream, while keeping the 140 char base.
That way people would only use the additional chars if they really needed them, reducing noise from otherwise unnecessarily long tweets.
When I read this, I thought I was on somebody's blog who wanted to give her idea on why they didn't like Twitter. Then I realised this was... Twitter's blog.
The constraint of 140 characters is what made Twitter, IMHO, interesting. Sure it required you to do a bit of puzzling, but that's exactly what made each tweet read worthy.
Then came the bots and the spammers and the place got ruined. Twitter has a bunch of problems, but the 140 characters isn't one of them.
> Trying to cram your thoughts into a Tweet – we’ve all been there, and it’s a pain. When I read this, I thought I was on somebody's blog who wanted to give her idea on why they didn't like Twitter. Then I realised this was... Twitter's blog. The constraint of 140 characters is what made Twitter, IMHO, interesting. Sure it required you to do a bit of puzzling, but that's exactly what made each tweet read worthy. Then…
Presumably there are going to be a lot of broken 3rd party plugins on people’s sites(design wise at a minimum). Should there have been more of a warning period?
even worse, buffer overflows
Reading the 280 test page feels odd. It kills the instantaneous feel of 140chars. The 280 ones feel like engaging a different part of your brain. I think they should try to allow easier creation and reading of "thread" (when one user starts a long stream, while keeping the 140 char base.
Good. Twitter needs to keep moving forward. There have been several features that feel like the core of their platform, but based on their revenue growth, they may be holding them back. Personally, eh, 280-length tweets feel weird and long and I don't see the need, but I'll probably get over it. If they can change how Twitter is used open up new audiences and conversations, this is good. They are trying something big…
Will this change improve engagement number or ad revenue? I sincerely doubt it.
An actual useful change would be versioning functionality so that users can edit tweets to correct typos or factual errors while not erasing the record.
I suppose there is nothing inherently ideal about the (arbitrary) 140 character limit on tweets. Why not 180, or 280, etc?
Still, my first reaction was, this is .. a bad idea: the 140-character limit is iconic, it's at the core of their value proposition, and Twitter is going to dilute their brand if they abandon it.
I think it's not only that people sometimes feel limited by the 140 characters that matters, it's also all the other times when people don't feel social pressure to write up longer, perhaps more thoughtful messages, that's important here.