Remember how we told you we were working on ways to let you to express more with 140 characters? Since then, we’ve introduced two updates, and today we’re rolling out another. Now, when you reply to someone or a group, those @usernames won’t count toward your Tweet’s 140 characters.
On paper this is a logical choice but this change will severely cripple and effectively kill Twitter’s 4040 product, aka real-twitter to those of us who were in the first million users.
Jack’s vision was for a global communication service where the only barrier to entry was a cell phone with a texting plan. You could text Follow CNN to 40404 and you’d get every tweet from CNN who’s tweets were limited to 140 characters. The SMS character limit is 160 so it’d allow for the person’s username “Tweet fro CNN, “blah blah” to not exceed 160 characters and thus cost the user two SMS texts. Someone on a pay as you go plan paying 10 cents per text could receive global news from anyone they wished for free.
Twitter never monetized the service but it still works. Despite not being a Twitter user as a participant anymore, I still follow a few dozen people via SMS. I don’t see their replies, only their stream of consciousness as it happens, 24/7.
By removing the limit, if you do follow the replies of people, you’re going to lose. If @TaylorSwift replies to 2-3 friends or says “My record company @CapitalRecords and @EMI is being mean to me, cc @WME @RollingStoneMagazine”, I’m going to receive two text messages or a truncated message. This means someone on a pay as you go text plan is now missing out on the entire Twitter stream.
Twitter never monetized SMS users so perhaps I shouldn’t throw up a huge fit about this. The technical and usability issues are nothing compared to these being a fundamental decay in Jack’s vision. His Twitter vision has a footnote now or an addendum or amendment. It’s been 12 years since Twitter was invented about 18 since Jack thought it up.
Supporters of no-limit Twitter say it is a holdover from an earlier time that serves no real purpose. Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey originally implemented the 140-character restriction because he expected that most people would use text-messaging services from their mobile carriers to update their status, and most text messages were truncated at 160 characters. Short messages were also seen as being more approachable for new users who might be intimidated by the need to come up with longer posts.