Wednesday, September 27, 2017

Twitter doubles its character limit—and users aren’t pleased

Your tweets might soon become longer, though many say that’s not a positive change.

On Tuesday, Twitter announced that it was affording selected users a character limit of 280—double what users currently have:

Jack Dorsey, a Twitter co-founder and its chief executive, also tweeted the news:

Aliza Rosen, a Twitter product manager, and Ikuhiro Ihara, a senior software engineer at Twitter, said the change could balance issues with wording and space across languages. They wrote in the company’s blog:

Trying to cram your thoughts into a Tweet – we’ve all been there, and it’s a pain.

Interestingly, this isn't a problem everywhere people Tweet. For example, when I (Aliza) Tweet in English, I quickly run into the 140 character limit and have to edit my Tweet down so it fits. Sometimes, I have to remove a word that conveys an important meaning or emotion, or I don’t send my Tweet at all. But when Iku Tweets in Japanese, he doesn’t have the same problem. He finishes sharing his thought and still has room to spare. This is because in languages like Japanese, Korean, and Chinese you can convey about double the amount of information in one character as you can in many other languages, like English, Spanish, Portuguese, or French.

We want every person around the world to easily express themselves on Twitter, so we're doing something new: we're going to try out a longer limit, 280 characters, in languages impacted by cramming (which is all except Japanese, Chinese, and Korean).

… Twitter is about brevity. It's what makes it such a great way to see what's happening. Tweets get right to the point with the information or thoughts that matter. That is something we will never change.

We understand since many of you have been Tweeting for years, there may be an emotional attachment to 140 characters – we felt it, too. But we tried this, saw the power of what it will do, and fell in love with this new, still brief, constraint. We are excited to share this today, and we will keep you posted about what we see and what comes next.

Twitter employees took to the platform to spread positive messages and additional information about the change:

[RELATED: Joins us for the Social Media #Mashup at Disneyland.]

However, many Twitter users weren’t happy with the news, tweeting with snark and derision:

Vox’s German Lopez wrote:

Here’s why I, a prolific Twitter user, do not like this change: As Rosen acknowledges, Twitter is about brevity. It is supposed to make you think about removing words to make your thoughts snappier and your messages more concise. In a world filled with way too much overly long writing, Twitter brings back word and character limits that force you to get to the point.

To his credit, Dorsey has been responding to criticism through his profile:

Though most active Twitter users don’t seem to like the change, the site’s overlords are probably hoping the feature will make the platform more enticing for new users—something it has struggled to gain (along with additional advertising revenue).

However, the risk of driving current users to leave Twitter might prompt platform executives to ax the longer tweets.

Marketing Land’s Tim Peterson wrote:

By relaxing the maximum length of a tweet, Twitter would hope to make itself more inviting to people previously frustrated by its forced brevity but could risk alienating others for whom that brevity makes their feeds more easily scannable. The delicate balance between risk and reward suggests why Twitter has not committed to the change. Instead, the company will use the test to see how people respond to seeing longer tweets and how the option to write longer affects the length of a typical tweet.

The Verge’s Casey Newton wrote:

… [S]uper-sized tweets are likely to change the nature of the network as more people gain access to them, and in unpredictable ways. Will those multi-message “tweetstorms” shrink into a smaller number of tweets, or will the expanded real estate encourage people to write even more? What new kinds of jokes and memes are possible at 280 characters that were not possible at 140? Will 280 characters allow for just enough nuance and diplomacy that we may be able to avert global thermonuclear war?

If double-size tweets are here to stay, PR and marketing pros would be wise to take up that additional space only when 140 characters cannot do.



from PR Daily News Feed http://ift.tt/2yHdVBO
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)