Twitter's "10K Characters" and Why It'll Rip the Tiny, Little Bird Soul Out of Twitter.

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 Once upon a time there were a million social media platforms, all about the same thing: Take selfies, post cynical complaints about the world, and then poke your friends. But then, along came a little birdy that only allowed tiny little 140 character tweets...the friend-poking, selfie-taking masses were enraged, intrigued, and then captivated by the idea. A character limit actually turned out to be a good thing...because instead of ranting endlessly about such and such political, feminist thing, you had to choose your best words. And thus Twitter was born.

  By now, you have all heard about the proposed 10k character limit set to unroll in March. The idea as presented would not necessarily disrupt your own viewing of tweets, because as the Twitter pointed out:

"The design aspect is key. Making Tweets bigger by adding more content or bigger pictures has diminished user engagement in the past, according to one source. That makes sense. If tweets take a long time to consume or take up more space on your screen, it’s likely that you’ll view (and engage with) fewer of them. So Twitter is trying to add more content without disrupting the way you currently scroll through your timeline."

That's one relief, because if you've ever used Twitter, you've been subjected to A LOT of crappy spam tweets...and now we are wanting to give them leeway to use 10k character tweets to cram your nice little feed with a Facebook feed of garbage. It would go something like this...

The new future tweet limit gonna leave the timeline looking like #Twitter10k pic.twitter.com/CJmJTiWro0

— Incognito (@behlul_official) January 6, 2016

Why did the Gettysburg address have so much success? Because it was only about 270 words (1400 characters or so) versus one Edward Everett that had given an incredible, horribly-long speech just prior. Ted Widmer from NY Times explains that concisely:

Edward Everett had spent his life preparing for this moment. If anyone could put the battle into a broad historical context, it was he. His immense erudition and his reputation as a speaker set expectations very high for the address to come. As it turned out, Americans were correct to assume that history would forever remember the words spoken on that day. But they were not to be his. As we all know, another speaker stole the limelight, and what we now call the Gettysburg Address was close to the opposite of what Everett prepared. It was barely an Address at all; simply the musings of a speaker with no command of Greek history, no polish on the stage, and barely a speech at all – a mere exhalation of around 270 words. Everett’s first sentence, just clearing his throat, was 19 percent of that – 52 words. By the time he was finished, about 2 hours later, he had spoken more than 13,000.

LESS is MORE. It seems like technology today solely has the aim of either growing bigger or smaller depending on where they are at the moment. Think IPhone, IPad, etc...

But why would you want to take away the one thing that makes Twitter what it is? Instead of a short, little, chirpy tweet, now we have a foghorn blasting away at us.

And as an addendum, to relate to the writers of the world, who like me, constantly battle with page limits, or word counts, and trying to get just the right amount of words per chapter. It's a huge pain, but at the end of the day, it makes your writing that much better. It makes every word choice a rich delicacy, something that will pour off the pages and satiate our literary hunger. So keep at it with the editing phase, and make every word count.


A final plea: Don't do it Twitter! For the sake of all the tweeps in the world, don't do it!  

-C

(AND FYI, this blog post comes in at just over 3K characters...I didn't even rant enough to reach the limit. I need at least 3 times this much!)