Commentary

Twitter Reconsiders Tweet Length, Humanity Holds Its Breadth

Tweets supporting more than 140 characters at a time?! Anarchy! Blood in the streets!

Seriously, though, the rumored development is long overdue, and, well, who could ague with it? Twitter purists? Come on. To the degree that it does, the social giant should have stopped listening to those guys long ago.

As the Bard said, brevity is the soul of wit, but it’s been a drag on Twitter’s usefulness and mainstream popularity for years.

Resourceful users already know how to sidestep the character restraints by tweeting pictures of text blocks -- commonly referred to as “screenshorts” -- or a series of numbered tweets. Unfortunately, these workarounds have only added to what average users -- i.e., most people -- see as Twitter’s cluttered complexity.  

Anyway, it’s not even clear how the changes will impact Twitters’ flagship product. As sources tell Re/code, the company is working on “a new product” that will let users tweet out more than 140 characters at a time.

Bigger picture, it’s refreshing to see longer-form content making a comeback in this age of abbreviation.

Medium, the content platform pioneered by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, is doing well, and just raised $57 million to do even better. What’s more, Facebook recently reimagined its long-neglected Notes service as a platform for reading and writing long-form content, while Tumblr just rolled out support for long-form content.

What’s next? A return to pen and paper?!

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