Twitter is a social media powerhouse that burst onto the scene in 2009 thanks to its immediacy with news and of course, the famed 140 character limit.
It was creative in a way – reducing your thoughts to a couple of words, possibly gaining hundreds or thousands of retweets. Now, things are about to change.
Last week, Twitter announced that it would be increasing its character limit to 280, and a selected few on the Twitter multiverse have already gotten a hang of the process.
Releasing a statement on their blog, the company said: “We want every person around the world to easily express themselves on Twitter, so we’re doing something new: We’re going to try out a longer limit, 280 characters, in languages impacted by cramming (which is all except Japanese, Chinese, and Korean)”.
As expected, the news was met with criticism. Namibian blogger @SugaryOblivion had this to say about it: “We don’t need it! I wish Twitter would focus on things its users actually want like stopping harassment instead of increasing characters”.
And there’s more negative aspects to it: Users will probably not use the 280 characters anyway and stick to their daily tweeting, but others will take advantage and make their tweets boring which means more reading and a lot more #FakeNews being passed around.
The advantages? Well, more expression. Facebook jokes will become a thing (if you’re a fan of them anyway), and marketers will have more space to convince people to buy their products.
Twitter’s aim is in fact to attract more users, especially those who use Facebook. Because Twitter is seeking world domination. At the moment, Facebook is currently the largest social media platform in the world, with over a billion users. Twitter only has around 300 million. But is this a good move?
“This was a small change, but a big move for us,” founder of Twitter Jack Dorsey said on the social media site. “140 was an arbitrary choice based on the 160 character SMS limit. Proud of how thoughtful the team has been in solving a real problem people have when trying to tweet.”
Looks like only time will tell if Twitter is making the biggest mistake ever or if they are simply moving with the times.
