How Twitter might change without the 140 characters limit

Must-read article by John Hermann, writing for The Awl:¹

But a feed in which you can already tap “play” or open a grid of photos into a slideshow or open a link into an internal browser is a feed in which tapping a text preview to see more text will feel natural.

I get why people are afraid of change. It has always been the case with social media (remember when people got angry at the new profile pages on Facebook?) But this particular change — even if it might become the biggest change of all — probably won’t annoy me as much as some of the previous changes Twitter made (I am looking at you heart-shaped buttons).

I’ve said this before on this very blog: the 140 characters limit is not what defines Twitter. What defines Twitter is its network of users, its affinity-based social graph. I don’t see why a well designed button to “read more” would ruin the experience more than opening a link into a new tab, or a screenshort.