The big event this week for people on Twitter: the maximum size of a tweet went from 140 to 280 characters. Users had many opinions, for and against; I’m in the “against” camp.
In my opinion, the special nature of Twitter came from its short messages. They enabled fast reading and so made it possible to follow a swiftly-moving thread. You can’t skim multi-line messages the same way; they require closer reading. The number of characters has doubled, but not the value of the content.
I often recommend Twitter in my courses as a tool for developing writing skills. The value of the tool is based on learning how to craft a concise message. The 280-character tweets look like first drafts of 140-character tweets in need of an editor.
The number of characters also seems to affect the type of content. More and more, my stream includes Facebook-style stories. Obviously, through these changes, Twitter is targeting Facebook-style users rather than its current, more pragmatic users.
What can those of us who dislike this change do? Chrome users can download an add-on that cuts the tweet off after 140 characters. About a quarter of my Saturday morning tweet stream showed the red X left by this truncator.