It is official. The 140 Twitter character limit is under review. Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey, confirms that one of Twitter’s most distinctive features may soon become obsolete. Tweets won’t just be a little longer, they will be 9,860 characters longer—which averages 1,700 words per tweet. That’s like the allowance of a short novel for every single tweet. How does the public feel about potential character bombardments clogging up our feeds?
Answer: Not Too Happy
It seems Twitter’s investors were not overly thrilled by this news, as the social media giant’s stock plummeted to $21.89—almost an all-time low for this already-troubled company. The shareholders have suffered enough over the years, do they really need this now?
Dorsey affirmed the validity of the rumours via his Twitter account. In his message, he wrote: “At its core Twitter is public messaging. A simple way to say something, to anyone, that everyone in the world can see instantly.” Key word here: simple. “It inspires creativity and brevity.” Brevity, you say? He adds, “We will never lose that feeling.”
Surely “brevity” is not the best word for 10,000-character tweets. Actually, 10,000 characters is the exact opposite of brief. To put these figures into a relatable example, the total sum used in this post thus far is 1,388 characters. Even this article has not yet reached the potentially new Twitter limits.
In the same message, Dorsey wrote “What makes Twitter, Twitter is its fast, public, live conversational nature.” We aren’t sure about you, but we know that if someone walked up to us and said this much information to us in one go, it would feel rather more like a monologue than a conversation. It is difficult to keep someone’s attention for that long whilst talking, so what reasoning is there that people will hold their attention even longer to read something that is supposed to be “simple” and “brief”? Frankly, we don’t see the rationale here. Clearly Twitter’s shareholders don’t, either, if these were the stock results after the announcement:
Via Google
Click Dorsey’s message (below) to view the post on Twitter.
