The Social Campfire

I am completely, 100 percent opposed to Twitter’s consideration of increasing the current tweet limit of 140 characters to a whopping 10,000 characters. 

From 140 to 10,000? I completely understand the character increase for direct messaging purposes, but for the tweets themselves? Would Twitter even be the same? I think not.

Plus, we’ve had tools like TweetLonger for the longest time, for those who can’t shut up or save their ranting for places like Facebook.

For me personally, Twitter ranks first on my list of preferred social networking sites precisely because of its immense brevity. You must be creative, thoughtful, and quick to make it on Twitter – and that’s part of its ingenuity and one of its biggest value propositions against its competitors.

I understand that Twitter has struggled with going public, but a character increase to 10,000 makes it the same as any other mainstay platform around, if not worse.

Today, it’s one of the best social networking platforms for news, quick reads, and rapid communal chatting. You can’t do any of that on Facebook. To me, it’s selling out – and in my opinion, they need to do more to educate non-users on its current benefits than try and appease those who don’t understand it.

Think you’re annoyed by too many #hashtags now? I can only imagine…and #shudder. @Spamming may also become #aproblem. 

To soften the below, there may be a “read more” call to action – after 140 characters, perhaps an expanded window would then appear – but to me, that is going backwards in terms of what app users want today. More clicks, more reading, longer paragraphs – I thought we were trying to move away from that?

With all of the mobile applications and social networking sites competing for popularity, and with the giant gorilla –  Facebook – hovering over all the others, there is much pressure for brands like Twitter to copycat to sell shares.

Twitter’s move toward ambiguity appears to be a future deficit, and perhaps they should invest in a different way of thinking.

What do you think of Twitter’s consideration to increase the regular messaging character limit to 10,000 from 140? Comment below!