My Thoughts on Twitter Wanting to Go From 140 Characters to 280

Twitter is testing its character limit from 140 to 280. What?? I think what makes Twitter so cool and great is the 140 characters.

After thinking this through for the past 24 hours, going over the pros and cons, here’s my assessment.

Twitter doesn’t need to be another Facebook, LinkedIn or Instagram. It’s unique that Twitter is short form posts done in real-time. It makes for fast moving conversations. If it goes to 280 characters, we are doubling the size of our conversations which means it will take longer to read them.

Twitter chats move at a rapid pace. Could you imagine taking the time to read a much longer post? And multiply that times the hundreds or thousands of tweets in a chat. The #TwitterSmarter chat averages around 1200 tweets each Thursday. OMG, just think about this for a moment. It’s not a pretty picture.

Rather than extending character limits, why not give us the ability to edit our tweets. That is what we really want. Just a short 3-5 minute window. Give us that ability, Twitter, and we’ll be happy as clams.

Okay, over to you. What do you think?