Twitter users are going crazy, again, over another report that Twitter will soon raise its famous limit of 140 characters length of tweets. They should calm down, unless they care deeply about the WWW (World Wide Web), in which case they would be free to get angry after all.
If I'm right about what's really going on here, this movement isn't going to fundamentally alter how Twitter looks, feels, or is used. Rather, it will change where online content is hosted, who controls it, and who is in a position to monetize it.
First, some context. He influential technology blog Re/Code first reported in September that Twitter was building a new product that will allow people to share tweets from more than 140 characters.
A new report from Re/Code, published Tuesday, puts a number on that new product, and it's a big number: 10.000 characters. Like, Twitter will raise the character limit for tweets from 140 to 10.000. The new report, again citing anonymous sources, also adds a name for the project
Twitter calls it internally “Beyond 140”, The date: The new character limit could go into effect in the next three months. This is interesting information, and Re/Code's Kurt Wagner deserves credit for the dig, even if it's still a bit speculative. I have no problem believing him.
And yet, like last time, the true meaning of the story is being widely misinterpreted. Here is the key passage, where Wagner describes the change:
Twitter is currently testing a version of the product in which tweets appear the same way they do now, showing only 140 characters, with some type of call to action for more content that cannot be seen.
Clicking on the tweets then expands them to reveal more content. The point of this is to keep the same look and feel for your timeline, even if this design is not in its final form, sources say.
If this is correct, then it may be technically true that Twitter is raising the character limit from 140 to 10.000, or some other large number.
But from a functional point of view, the service will look the same: Tweets capped at 140 characters of text, some of which also contain other things, such as photos, videos, vines, or links to longer articles on other sites.
People are already posting 10.000 character stories on Twitter. I do it all the time, and the same goes for many others.
This is achieved by composing a 140 character tweet that includes a full or reduced URL link with information which most of the time is hosted somewhere else.
“Beyond 140” would essentially eliminate the need to host an article on some other server. Everything could now be hosted on Twitter. And instead of a link and a “view summary” button, you would see a “read more,” or something similar, which would allow you to read the entire article without leaving the Twitter app or Twitter.com.
What's really changing here, then, is not the length of the tweet. It's where that link at the bottom takes you when you click on it. Instead of funneling traffic to blogs, news sites, and other sites around the Web, the “read more” button will keep you scrolling through Twitter.
Source: Future Tense (www.slate.com)
