A character assassination

On January 6, Jack Dorsey, co-founder and CEO of Twitter took everybody by surprise when he posted a message that went well beyond Twitter’s signature character count of 140. Amid extreme speculation about the micro-blogging site considering expanding its character limit to 10,000, Dorsey’s Tweet only fuelled the fire. “We didn’t start Twitter with a 140 character restriction. We added that early on to fit into a single SMS message (160 characters)” he said in his tweet. Dorsey didn’t make it clear how soon they would switch to an expanded character count and if at all, would it be 10,000 characters as rumours suggest. He, however, said this much: “ we’re telling developers well in advance, so they can prepare accordingly.”

Till we know for certain, the question remains how would this out-of-character move bode for Twitter We did some asking around to find that social media experts and avid users of Twitter largely feel the micro-blogging site would lose its charm and its core USP of brevity. Hitesh Rajwani, head of business development and CRM at Social Samosa, a social media knowledge portal, says, “The platform is preferred for quick conversations since it nurtures the art of expressing opinions and views in short bytes. Twitter has been struggling with revenue generation. The extension of character limit might be the masterstroke required to acquire new users and open up revenue streams.” Social Samosa on its Twitter handle has also conducted a poll to get an idea of what would its users prefer. Hitesh reveals, “81 per cent of users would still prefer 140 characters over the extended limit. Now we all have to wait and watch to see if Twitter is able to settle scores with other social media platforms through this uncharacteristic move.”

Meanwhile, here’s what some of the most popular Twitteratti had to say, while not being restricted to 140 characters.

Sorabh Pant @hankypanty Joined December 2009 Followers: 72.2K Tweets: 28.1K It’s a pointless thing. The very essence of Twitter is that it is a micro-blogging site. As a writer it helped me edit my thoughts. Brevity is the soul of wit and I have grown obsessed with the site, I write my jokes in about 200 characters, later when I have to tweet it, I re-edit it and I see that it’s much better. If they increase the word limit it’ll give people like KRK a chance to write more! Imagine! And you just don’t want that. I joined Twitter because I was fed up of reading blogs, so many words from everywhere. I guess Twitter is doing this because it wants some new consumer base, I don’t even mind paying for using Twitter but they shouldn’t increase the limit.

Instead, they should be focussing on the advertising to increase the mass reach. Increasing the word limit would be like allowing users of Instagram to upload 3-hour videos! The whole purpose of the application will be lost.

Abhishek Asthana @GabbarSingh Joined January 2010 Followers: 256k Tweets: 141k Twitter’s USP is byte-size information, where people can consume one-liners and get a gist of what happened where. In an age of reduced attention spans, platforms like Twitter have played a vital role. In the past 10 years, Twitter has proliferated and the attention span has also considerably gone down. So the growth of Twitter has been inversely proportional to the attention span.

So whatever compulsions are driving them right now to do this, they are are trying to break out from what made Twitter popular. But I don’t think this is the right solution. As a content creator, it was a challenge for me to condense my thought into just 140 characters. And that challenge kind of spurred me to stay on and show my expertise. And to think that because of that limitation people are not joining Twitter, is, in my opinion, not the best approach to have.

Ashwin Sanghi @ ashwinsanghi Joined: November 2008 Followers: 142 k Tweets: 94.6 k For me the problem is not just Twitter but on every social media platform, where I feel people are coming in only to vent their anger. These platforms weren’t intended to do so. I use Twitter to share any piece of information or motivational or inspirational content that I may have read. For Twitter, the 140-character limitation was perhaps its raison d’être, where one had to really weigh each word, in fact, each character. It’s very similar to sending someone a text message.

If something needs to change it’s the attitude of the people, because I would prefer meaningful debates rather than spurring venom on social media.

Karan Talwar @BollywoodGandu Joined September 2009 Followers: 475K Tweets: 22.3K I don’t think it’s a good idea at all. Twitter due to the character limit forces people to think creatively and smartly, unlike Facebook. On Twitter people don’t have the time to read essays. Look at our timelines, they are constantly brimming with info. If the word limit is extended the writing would get poorer.

Shirish Kunder @ShirishKunder Joined July 2009 Tweets: 3,509 Followers: 247K I don’t have a problem with the 10,000 word character feature. I understand where these guys are coming from — they are looking to capture more users from Facebook and blogging websites. What could happen is that users may not read such long tweets because of such short attention spans. Personally, I prefer the 140-character format. I think jokes are much crisper, and the tweets are to the point. Also, even if there is a 10,000-character feature, there is nothing stopping us from framing our thoughts in 140 characters.

I would really like it if accounts on Twitter were verified. There are too many fake accounts and too much trolling happens. Verifying accounts would enable a cleaner timeline, and make it a medium for conversations.

Inputs from Aarti Bhanushali, Julie Sam and Somudra Banerjee