Is it time to double the Twitter character limit?

280 CHARACTERS: Farhad Manjoo argues that Twitter should double its character limit. As the company outgrows its 'dispatch/what are you doing' form of microblogging, it could be said that the company needs to rethink its strategy, and perhaps lose the stubbornness. There's a quote in the article from CEO Dick Costolo, which serves as a rather good retort for discussion about the threat Google+ poses to Twitter."You know, if you just look in the sideview mirror at what are particular companies doing, and then you start to say Twitter is going to be the world in your pocket—now with video chat!—then you lose your way, right? So, we're going to offer simplicity in a world of complexity, focus on our goal, while we understand what everyone else is doing." He makes a good point.

Personally, although I agree that the 140 character-limit is extremely restrictive, I feel that the medium has not been created to facilitate circumlocution, but more pithy, succinct and laconic updates. Perhaps 280 characters might be better (sure, it's not that much more), but I sense that people have grown used to the number – it's almost iconic, thanks to Twitter. I just don't think it'll happen.

GOOGLE'S THREAT: Erza Klein seems impressed with Google+. "But it turns out that Google+ retains Twitter’s appreciation of asymmetrical social networks: people can follow you without you following them, and you can choose to broadcast messages to them, and they can reply, and so on. I’ve been experimenting with this over the last few days and have been really surprised and impressed by how rich the resulting discussions are. It’s really highlighted the drawbacks of the 140-character limit and made Twitter a lot less appealing to me."