Elon Musk
decided to bring a major change to how people use Twitter by announcing that users
will soon be allowed to post longer tweets containing up to 4000 characters. In addition to that, Musk also plans to enable
sharing of longer videos, so users would spend more time engaging with videos on Twitter instead of
switching to other video focused platforms, particularly YouTube. The integration would also open up monetization opportunities for creators.
Twitter has
already shared a preview of what longer tweets in text would look like and how
the process would work.
It appears
that the first 280 characters of the tweet will be displayed in the regular in-stream
tweet format, with a ‘show more’ indicator at the end, clicking on which would display
the rest of the tweet in a longer panel.
While longer
tweets would facilitate users in sharing their thoughts without interrupting
the tweet stream, having to scroll all the way down to the end might come off
as a bit annoying. However, since this looks like the only way to integrate
longer tweets, users could eventually get used to the format.
Previously,
Twitter had been experimenting with an alternative to longer tweets by creating
‘Notes’ where users could write up to 2,500 words that could be shared
in the app by being natively embedded.
