07 Jan Twitter is Still Playing Catch-Up
Folks, who are both thrilled about the possibilities and/or worried about spam or clutter due to Twitter’s recent announcement regarding possibly increasing the platform’s character limit to 10,000, don’t need to worry or get overly excited.
This has nothing to do with you.
This is Twitter trying to keep up. In fact, you probably won’t see anything drastically different in the interface for a while. Twitter already announced that they’ll keep your timeline as-is — for now, at least. The real work is taking place under the hood, which is all done in an effort to increase your time on the Twitter platform. It’s the same dilemma that Facebook and Google face. Since Twitter, Facebook, and Google all do a very good job in promoting third party content on their platforms, how do they prevent people from clicking off and losing out on valuable time-on-site? If they are able to keep users on their platform, how will Facebook and others not make it a sucky experience for those users? For Facebook, the answer was Instant Pages. Google and others (including Twitter and Pinterest) recently introduced and open-sourced a similar idea called Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP. Both approaches promise fast delivery of third party content from publishers directly into Facebook and Google mobile platforms so users never have to leave the application. Tumblr figured this out a long time ago, as did Snapchat. In other words, you don’t give users a choice, you keep ’em in your walled garden.
Another smart move by Twitter, but they should really do a better job in balancing the needs of their current user base versus keeping up with the Joneses. I get why Twitter is doing this, but, damn, just release an Edit Tweet feature already.
