Yesterday twitter expanded the 280 character limit to everyone after a soft rollout. We can all now tweet twice as long. In place of the word counter inside the text window is a circle that fills up as your type. Fascinating.
I hate the change.
280 character tweets is TL:DR status. Perhaps more of an inditement of my outrageously short attention span, but my eyes automatically gloss over these longer tweets. If the first 10 words don't capture my attention then I move the heck on.
The twitter timeline with these long tweest starts to resemble the Facebook feed, and that's never a good thing.
I like twitter because it's quick, concise, and to the point. Trying to articulate well within the old 140 character paradigm was downright artful. Shakespeare and Mark Twain both were fans of brevity. Countless times I was up against the limit and had to prune/revise what I wanted to say - it was excellent practice. Sadly, wont' have to do that anymore.
And it isn't like twitter will ever go back: can't take the cake away once you've given it.
I hope this one time jump to 280 will be the end of it. At 280 it's already looking less like what twitter should be - with character-based languages like Korean it's practically an essay; any more increases it might as well be tumblr.