THE LOWDOWN
Is Twitter killing off its cache?
Twitter sent tweeters aflutter when, on June 14, group product manager Michael Sippey blogged
that Twitter was breaking out of its 140-character mold, offering “expanded Tweet” options to exclusive partner websites—with a wider rollout to follow. Experts are divided on whether the expansion
is a promising step for the social networking site to stay relevant among its rivals, or a detrimental
sellout that robs Twitter of one of its signature cachets.
Farhad Manjoo,
Slate
Expanded tweets are a great
development for Twitter,
a way to add depth to the
service while still clinging
to its hyperabridged roots.
Expanded tweets have been
around for a while—if you
include a picture or a video
as part of a message, then
your followers can click to
see it. This continued tweet
expansion was inevitable.
A shrinking percentage of
Twitter’s user base accesses
the site through SMS, so
the 140-character limit
was becoming increasingly
arbitrary. Most of us get our
tweets on the Web and on
smartphones, venues that
allow for richer content.
We’ll find that posts that
pack 410 characters worth
of information will make
the network a deeper, more
coherent source of news
and conversation. Twit-
ter won’t be a place that’s
always sending you away to
other things. Instead, it will
become a destination.
John C. Dvorak,
PC Magazine
Twitter’s decision to allow
expanded tweets will ruin
the service by encouraging
users to ramble. This seri-
ously violates the original
intent of the site and ruins its
charm. Twitter should make
people realize that they can
indeed be concise. I always
roll my eyes when a tweeter
uses the add-on called Twit-
Longer.com, which endlessly
extends the length of the
tweet. If you have something
complex to share, then write
it in a blog post and link to
that post in a tweet. Tweet-
ing, upon its inception, was
called a micro-blogging for
a reason. By changing the
model radically, Twitter
risks losing its cachet. Right
now, it’s all about snippets,
short impressions, and little
comments. The commentary
gets so pointed that the news
media commonly picks it
up and makes long stories
out of the tweets. To anyone
considering using this new
feature: Don’t do it.
Mathew Ingram,
GigaOm Pro
As far as I’m concerned, the
140-character limit is one
of the most brilliant things
Twitter has ever done—and
might even explain why it is
still around, let alone worth
a reported $8 billion or so.
Not only did that limit feel
comfortable to many users
who were familiar with text
messaging, but it restricted
what people could post, so
that Twitter didn’t become a
massive time-sink of 1,000-
word missives and rambling
nonsense. But throwing out
some of the core aspects of
what make Twitter useful
doesn’t really make any
sense at all. And I think
Twitter knows that. Does
Twitter encourage a “sound
bite” culture? Perhaps.
Mathew
Ingram,
GigaOm
Pro
Jon Mitchell,
ReadWriteWeb
Twitter’s new expanded
tweets initiative does the
highly improbable: It integrates photos, videos, and
music without disrupting the
fast-paced Twitter experience. Expanded tweets make
as much sense on mobile as
they do on the desktop, and
that’s a huge advantage for
Twitter over other places for
sharing pictures, videos, and
the rest. That combination—
rich content in a compact
format—is crucial to Twitter’s
future in a multiplatform
world. Twitter was the first
true mobile-native social
network, and the constraints
of the small screen have
forced it to keep its service
limited to essentials. Expanded tweets look a lot like
Facebook’s new mobile News
Feed posts. But it’s no coincidence that both Twitter and
Facebook devised a similar
approach at the same time.
It works. Twitter’s expanded
tweets are a delight—and
good for its media partners.
OUR VIEW:
Freedom of tweet just got freer, and while expanded tweets may take some of the edge and certainly some of the quick quip
out of Twitter—the move is ultimately a prosperous one. Twitter users will likely relish the opportunity to say more and show
more, while media partners will have increased incentive to get in the game, as they can now display embedded media—
essentially getting more bang for their tweet. The move could serve as a significant time-saver for tweeters who will no longer have
to leave the site to view content that can now be embedded in a single post. Worries that “Twitter will no longer be Twitter”
have been expressed, but we suspect that Twitter will still be Twitter throughout these tweaks. If the concern is that Twitter
will become too cluttered, and that users will get annoyingly chatty, honestly, wasn’t that already an issue?
