Twitter is reportedly considering the choice of removing the 140-character limit on public facing tweets. Hopefully they are kidding, or attempting to do something else.
The company has been playing around its limiting interface for a while. Earlier in the year, it removed the limit on DMs, just few months after it allowed users to “retweet with comment”; an option that gave people more room to comment on tweets instead of sandwiching comments into the 140-character limit along with the original tweet.
These little tweaks have been largely welcomed by the twitter denizens, but a development that removes limits on public facing tweets may be the ruin of Twitter.
The 140-character limit and brevity which has been Twitter’s trademark since its launch back in 2006 is also its greatest advantage. The limit pushes users to creatively share thoughts and on the other side of the divide, consume bite-sized information as opposed to slogging through a one-page update that is not uncommon on platforms like Facebook.
Removing the limit could well make Twitter another Facebook, only with a different shade of blue for its color scheme.
Re/code which first broke the story, citing sources familiar with the company’s plans, refers to the move as a “new product” that will allow users compose longer tweets. This suggests that this development may turn out to be only a new feature on Twitter.
While it’s not possible to speculate accurately how the feature will be executed, it’s possible that rather than removing limits on public facing tweets, Twitter will merely launch another platform that allows users create notes in the same way that Facebook already does. Which will be good. Because a TL with updates as wordy as a Wikipedia entry is not at all pretty. We’ll see how Twitter plays this.
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