JVTech News Twitter: Elon Musk confirms tweets will evolve soon, but maybe not in a good way
Tweets could soon be longer than ever: Elon Musk has confirmed his intention to significantly extend the number of characters of messages posted on Twitter, at the risk of distorting the principle of the platform.
In Twitter’s inception in 2006, users had to organize their thinking greatly due to limited messages to 140 characters. This usually sums up tweets a maximum fifteen words, a sobriety that has decreed the success of the platform at a time when everyone was beginning to tell a little too much about their lives on Facebook. It took until 2017 to double the maximum length of tweets: with 280 characters available, gives a little more room to express oneself.
But of course that’s still too little for Elon Musk. This weekend, the head of the service confirmed the rumor suggesting it Twitter may allow tweets of up to 4,000 characters. The irony of this announcement is that it was made succinctly, with a simple “Yes” in response to a user’s message. In fact, the boss of the social network is not himself a big fan of long messages.
4000 characters for a tweet is a lot!
Going from 140 to 280 characters might make sense. But does going from 280 to 4000 characters really have one? For comparison, here’s what the different evolutions of tweets look like taking into account the future evolution of Twitter.
4000 characters is longer than this news e in tweet format, without illustration and without the possibility of adding captions, it could quickly become unreadable. It seems relatively obvious that Twitter will have to find a solution to allow users of the platform to correctly format such messages and tolimit their full display in the timeline.
However, we can underline that even by significantly increasing the number of characters available within a tweet, Twitter still remains far behind certain “text-oriented” social networks. On Facebook, you can write up to 63,206 characters for a status and up to 8,000 characters for a comment.. Conversely, Twitter is ahead of LinkedIn, which currently limits posts to 3,000 characters.
Longer tweets reserved for Twitter Blue?
Finally, one point remains to be clarified: that of the goal of this novelty. Since the Twitter Blue subscription has recently been reactivated, it is possible that the social network decides to reserve “long tweets” for people who have subscribed to this offer. Twitter Blue costs $8 a month (and $11 via iOS) and aside from the little blue badge on a member’s profile, benefits are still rare today. We can therefore imagine that additional features could motivate some Twitter users to checkout.
