Twitter 10,000 Character Plan Meets Backlash

ꕤ Article SOURCE http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/12087357/Removing-Twitters-140-character-limit-is-Jack-Dorseys-biggest-gamble-yet.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/12087357/Removing-Twitters-140-character-limit-is-Jack-Dorseys-biggest-gamble-yet.html Removing Twitter's 140-character limit is Jack Dorsey's biggest gamble yet Reaction to the possibility of 10,000 character tweets has been overwhelmingly negative, but Jack Dorsey has his reasons By James Titcomb 3:08PM GMT 07 Jan 2016 When Jack Dorsey sent the first tweet on March 21 2006, it was still 294 days until Steve Jobs would unveil the iPhone. There were no apps, and mobile phone messages were almost exclusively sent by text. The limits of text messages were precisely how Dorsey and his fellow founders arrived at the 140-character limit that came to define Twitter. Before the smartphone era, tweets were designed to be sent by text, which were limited to 160 characters (the extra 20 was set aside for usernames). In the 10 years since, we’ve all bought smartphones, and text messages have been replaced by apps. Twitter itself has also changed – adding photos, hashtags, polls, faves (now hearts) and more, but the 140-character cap has remained the same, a defining feature (if not the defining feature) of the social network that set it apart from the likes of Facebook. Until now. On Tuesday it emerged that Twitter plans to raise the character limit on tweets, probably to 10,000. Dorsey confirmed this with a tweet of his own a few hours later defending the move. Many Twitter devotees met the prospect with an instant backlash, and it’s easy to see why. A huge part of Twitter’s appeal, they say, is that tweets are short (if not always sweet). The cap allows users to keep up with the dozens of tweets a minute that pop up on their feeds, and it forces the public figures, pundits and comedians to keep things concise. Long tweets would probably be displayed as 140 characters with a "read more" button to see longer ones, but opponents still felt the change would ruin the magic of Twitter: hashtags were started up in protest. But it’s also easy to see why Twitter wants to change things. "We’ve spent a lot of time observing what people are doing on twitter, and we see them taking screenshots of text and tweeting it," Dorsey wrote in his own screenshotted statement (weighing in at 1,315 characters).  [comment: they're taking screenshots of SPECIFIC PORTIONS of text that convey a SPECIFIC message or point to readers - often from ARCHIVED news content.] "Instead, what if that text…was actually text? Text that could be searched. Text that could be highlighted. That’s more utility and power." [comment:  it's not worth the effort b/c anything searched, highlighted & 'published' on Twitter shall wind up in some Twitter deletion black hole.  Far better off saving, editing & posting data independently of Twitter in-house offerings instead of doing the Twitter platform any freebie favours.  Even basic retweets are getting deleted from Twitter b/c some wanker or other doesn't maybe fancy the comment or hastag marked up on the retweet.  Once again, Twitter sucks balls.] The bigger picture is that Twitter is in trouble. Monthly users grew by just 3 million in the third quarter of last year, against 13 million a year earlier. Twitter remains lossmaking. Dorsey, who was brought back as chief executive last year, has promised to revive Twitter with a host of new initiatives.  [comment:  most of those 'monthly users' that 'grew' are users the Twitter Stasi have blocked (by way of malicious reporting, sh*tty programming or active censorship) who have had to get back on the platform by setting up another account ... lol  F*ck you, Twitter.  Die soon.] Unlike other new ideas like Moments, the recently-launched feature that replaces the Twitter timeline with packages of tweets summarising events, extending tweets isn’t really an attempt to coax more people onto the platform. But it could keep more people on Twitter who are on Twitter already. People who might instead follow a link; post on a blogging platform; or, as Dorsey did, link to an screenshot of text.  [comment:  screw Twitter and their 'packages' -- just another way of attempting to influence public participants.  Assh*les.] In this way, it follows a similar pattern to other things Twitter has done to make tweets "richer" – allowing images, videos and gifs to be embedded, introducing polls and so on. Twitter was losing eyeballs to YouTube, and fixed it. Now, it is losing them to Tumblr, Medium and Facebook, and wants to fix that.  [comment:  I detest polls, as there's always an ulterior motive:  in this case furnishing Twitter with free information probably.  Refuse to give these censoring and politically suppressing corporate assh*les any freebies.  Ignore their sh*tty polls feature until it DIES.] The question is whether it can accomplish this without annoying the people that love the short format. One might argue that if you don’t want more than 140 characters, don’t use them, but many other people undoubtedly will, which could turn using Twitter into a process of opening and closing tweets, rather than the streamlined feed users are used to. Like all social networks, so much of Twitter’s product is its users, and so the success or failure of a new feature rests in how they apply it. Upping the character limit is expected by the end of March, so we won’t know whether this new idea will vastly improve Twitter or ruin it until then. What is certain is that this is one of the biggest gambles that Dorsey has taken so far. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/12087357/Removing-Twitters-140-character-limit-is-Jack-Dorseys-biggest-gamble-yet.html ---------------------- ꕤ ---------------------- COMMENT "So much of Twitter's PRODUCT is its USERS". Hear that, Twitter asssssssssh******lessssssssssssssss? From the way twitter treats public participants on the platform, you would think the public user is the enemy. Die soon, you commercial, censoring, privacy-raping and politically-suppressing establishment and establishment-serving assh*les! ꕤ

Twitter Greed Growing - Plans to Spam Customers with Commercial Publishing - 10,000 characters

ꕤ Article SOURCE http://recode.net/2016/01/06/twitters-longer-tweets-pave-the-way-for-more-publisher-deals/  [CLICK image for enlargement / clarity] Twitter Greed Growing - Plans to Spam Customers with Commercial Publishing -  10,000 characters http://recode.net/2016/01/06/twitters-longer-tweets-pave-the-way-for-more-publisher-deals/ Twitter’s Longer Tweets Pave the Way for More Publisher Deals Kurt Wagner  |  By Kurt Wagner |  @KurtWagner8 January 6, 2016, 10:57 AM PST Now that we know Twitter is building a feature to let users share longer tweets, maybe as long as 10,000 characters, that could have big consequences for publishers. [ ... ] CEO Jack Dorsey pointed out that expanding the tweet length means regular users won’t need to share images of text to work around the current limit. But more importantly, the move paves the way for Twitter to actually host content on its platform, not just links to content. Expanded tweets will give publishers a chance to run stories directly on Twitter the same way they do now with Facebook’s Instant Articles, Snapchat Discover and Apple News. Twitter wouldn’t need to convince publishers that it’s a great place for their content — that has already been established by the fact that every publisher I know of has an active Twitter account (if not multiple Twitter accounts). Handing over content to Twitter could increase readership, too. Way more people see publisher tweets than actually click on their links. The benefit for Twitter, of course, is that hosting content keeps users inside of Twitter instead of clicking to venture off to other websites. Twitter COO and revenue boss Adam Bain, in an interview Tuesday with Re/code’s Peter Kafka, didn’t dismiss the idea. “It’s an interesting way to look at it,” he said. “We certainly have been helping content companies today bring video content closer to consumers.” He mentioned twice that Twitter and publishers are working to generate revenue “together.” Twitter could certainly benefit from a new revenue stream. The company’s user growth has basically flatlined, which means Twitter needs to come up with ways to make more money from the same pool of people already on the service. Twitter has been able to do this over the past year. Revenue in Q3 jumped almost 58 percent over the previous year despite user growth of just 11 percent. But there’s no doubt the company is looking for other forms of revenue to sustain that trend. Questions still remain, of course. What might ads tied to hosted content look like? Could Twitter put an ad inside a tweet? Imagine reading a headline in a tweet, expanding that tweet to read an article, and coming across some kind of ad midway through the story or along the right rail. It seems like a possibility, although Twitter has made no indication it’s thinking along these lines. Plus, don’t forget that Twitter and Google “teamed up” on a project that felt like it might offer something similar back in September, but that turned out to be more of a Google project without any content actually living on Twitter. Hosting content is the new “thing to do” for social platforms, and it certainly makes sense for Twitter. Longer tweets may just be step one. http://recode.net/2016/01/06/twitters-longer-tweets-pave-the-way-for-more-publisher-deals/ ---------------------- ꕤ ---------------------- COMMENT Hosting publisher content on 'social platforms' (as well as the annoying Twitter advertising spamming that they're already bugging participants with) is something of an oxymoron:  there's nothing 'social' about such an arrangement. By amping up commercialising, by hosting a heap of crap, by annoying public participants with advertising, by hosting large slabs of MSM, corporate, government & intelligentsia propaganda and spam, this platform is anything but 'social'. The sooner people find some other way to communicate information by cutting out the commercially motivated middle man, corporations, and the state, the better. Why aren't all those open source developers creating a real peoples' communication platform? ꕤ