Twitter doubles tweets
Messenger service Twitter has given up its trademark 140 character limit and doubled it to 280 for certain users. Journalists take a sceptical view of the strategy and mourn the passing of the succinct tweet.
No more short and sweet tweets
The world is in danger of losing the wonderful conciseness of tweets à la Trump, columnist Arjan Peters gibes in De Volkskrant:
“It's like telling a Haiku poet to spread his precious findings across an entire sonnet. The exciting double tweets of US President Trump, which act like trailers for his unpredictable moves will be less interesting. Trump was a master in ending Tweet 1 with a cliffhanger and an ellipsis. ('Today I got my team together to ...'), thus keeping the world in a state of suspense. Now much of the suspense of Twitter will be lost. Instead of an exclamation we'll be fobbed off with a short treatise. Who wants that?”
Will 280 characters be enough?
Avvenire is sceptical about whether doubling the character limit will help Twitter's cause:
“The bitter truth is that this decision was not taken to please the users. Because the option of changing messages - which users have long been clamouring for - remains unavailable. The change of strategy is merely the umpteenth sign of the major crisis in which the tweeter network finds itself. ... It's hard to tell whether this strategy will be successful. The company is confident that users will send more tweets when they are no longer forced to compress their thoughts into 140 characters. Will 280 be enough, though?”