Twitter is well known for its 140 character limit for writing tweets. But, Twitter has seen big losses recently; in the second quarter they had a reported loss of $160 million and didn’t seen any growth in users. Twitter’s idea is that by increasing the character limit it will make it easier for people to express their thoughts because some people complain about how hard it is to fit their thoughts in a mere 140 characters, and Twitter’s thought is that if the site is easier to use, then more people will use it. Twitter will assign random users the ability to use 280 characters for an unspecified number of weeks to test the theory.
4 comments:
I don't think the 280-word character limit increase will boost Twitter's losses. There are many ways to work around the 140-word limit, like using "..." to show that more than one tweets go together. In journalism, there is a huge focus on how to get the point across in as few words or characters as possible because readers have a short attention span and don't want to read fluff. They want to get straight to the point. If anything, Twitter is going against the trend of using fewer characters. The glory of Twitter is that it's short and sweet. I disagree with the choice of increasing the character-limit, but we'll have to wait and see if it is successful.
I agree with Victoria in that the 280 word limit will not increase Twitter's loss of users. I think that Victoria is also right that Twitter is short and sweet. People don't go on Twitter or have the time to read essays of peoples opinion. Twitter may have fallen a lot more lately because of the rise of Snapchat and Instagram. Not because of the character limit. Twitter should focus its attention on other main infrastructure issues.
I don't think twitter will increase it's number of users by increasing the character count. With the rise of other social media platforms, old platforms are obviously going to decrease in following. I follow people that use twitter as a platform for voicing their political views, which would be easier in 280 words, rather than 140. Yes, they originally prided themselves on short and sweet, but people will still enjoy the increased character count. People will not make twitter accounts just for the 280 count, but they might be more inclined to use it.
Upon reading the article, I discovered that brevity is a defining characteristic of Twitter, evident in the 140 word limit and in the logo of a bird because the “chirps from a bird” are quick and sweet. Furthermore, the cause of Twitter’s situation is not known for sure, demonstrating that the short word limit may not be the reason for the loss of growth and money. Only some people complain how hard it is to fit their thoughts into the word limit, solidifying the idea that the word limit may not be the problem. Furthermore, as Andrea brought up, with the rise of other platforms, older ones will decrease in following and I believe that Twitter may belong in those older platforms, demonstrating that another cause could be the newness of the site. Nevertheless, I believe that carrying out this experiment of randomly assigning a 280 word limit is beneficial in figuring out the real source of the losses. Additionally, users can still follow the idea of Twitter’s short comments because Twitter is only adding more space for words and not forcing users to type more information.
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