Why Twitter shouldn’t change its character limit
ReadWriteWeb’s Richard MacManus argues that Twitter should no longer be constrained by its 140-character limit. He says TweetDeck has recently introduced Deck.ly, which enables longer messages (although it appears to be roundly hated by everyone I follow on Twitter) and it’s only a matter of time before Twitter itself follows suit, in order to be more fully embraced by the mainstream.
I think MacManus is wrong. The mainstream embraced short-form messages in the SMS age, and so Twitter is hardly tough to grasp. But if Twitter did ditch the character limit, it has a lot to lose. The forced brevity of tweets is a major part of what attracts people to the service: anyone posting is forced to be brief; consumption is quick. With longer tweets, you end up with realtime public messaging that’s little different from some kind of hellish full-post RSS feed that never goes away.
MacManus:
If Twitter drops the 140 character limitation, I think Twitter producers will adjust and only post longer tweets occasionally. Twitter will need to monitor that somehow, but – barring a drastic change in user behavior – Twitter users won’t stop producing short tweets just because long ones become available to them. They’ll use the long tweets sparingly, because they’ve been habituated into doing short tweets.
People use what’s available to them, and it only takes ‘noise’ (i.e. stupidly long tweets) from a few parties to wreck the magic of the service. If you want longer messages, get yourself a blog and fire post headlines to your Twitter feed
MacManus again:
As for new users, Twitter will need to effectively convey in their marketing that Twitter is ideal for short-form real-time messaging.
So from a focussed “here’s what it’s for” message to one that’s muddied with “well, it’s good for this, but can also be used for that”. Yeah, I can’t see any problems with that idea.
I absolutely agree. Keep it short. The character limit is, in many ways, Twitter’s defining characteristic. It’s what sets it apart from regular blog posts, forums, et al. And the argument that people will only use the longer tweets sparingly is just gibberish; it makes me wonder if Mr MacManus lives in a cave or a garret and never actually gets to observe human behaviour at all. It’s like saying “if we build more roads, people will only drive on them now and then because they’re conditioned to the old roads.” It’s nonsense.