280 Characters and It All Feels The Same…

When they first announced they would double the maximum length of a tweet, I thought they were crazy.

People immediately took advantage of did some weird spam stuff. They typed out entire sentences vertically. Like this:

V
E
R
T
I
C
A
L

And in the process of doing that, you had to scroll down the page forever to get past the tweet. There have been a few exploits like that in recent days. But now that the big twitter update to 280 characters has gone out site wide, it all looks the same.

Nothing to Say

It’s strange that there isn’t much to do with the extra characters. Nothing is different now. It feels awkward to try and come up with some super long tweet to take advantage of the space. For such a big decision, it feels… like nothing.

Twitter claims that there is a difference. They say that people are less inclined to max out their tweets now - less than 1% of tweets will use all characters as opposed to 9% in the old days.

I think this is one of those changes that pays off later on. In a few days when I come up with a great 200 character tweet, I’ll realize that the update is good. Right now I’m completely indifferent because my tweeting experience feels exactly the same.

What are you doing with your extra characters?

Is your twitter experience better or worse now? Do you see a lot of long tweets in your timeline? I wonder if everybody’s experience is as mundane as mine.

The most interesting question is: Will Twitter be better now? I think that conversations might be more productive with a little extra room to make points. 140 characters was brutal when you had to respond to somebody. 280 is a lot better for conversation.

Let me know what you think in the comments. If you haven’t connected with me on Twitter yet, send me a message over there.