Twitter's new 280-character limit trial is a risky strategy

Social media site Twitter is trialling longer, 280-character limits to help users “easily express themselves”. At first glance this announcement might seem like nothing but a nice new feature. But this new step exemplifies two ways in which Twitter continues to tread a fine line between success and failure.

Firstly, what this move demonstrates is how difficult it is to get the balance between being distinctive and having to move closer to the features that rivals offer. Secondly, the new measure heaps new problems onto an unstable business model that keeps Twitter unprofitable.

In the announcement of more space for longer messages, Aliza Rosen, Twitter’s product manager and Ikuhiro Ihara, the senior software engineer, argued that some languages need more characters to express a message than others. Confident that most users won’t have a basis for comparison, they proposed that giving a larger space for messages to some English-language users will stem frustration at the traditional limit. But their post immediately contains a giveaway contradiction:

Twitter is about brevity. It’s what makes it such a great way to see what’s happening. Tweets get right to the point with the information or thoughts that matter. That is something we will never change.

This contradiction is at the heart of the dilemma that all social media platforms face. If successful in attracting users, they have to offer something distinctive. Yet as new rivals enter the scene they have to innovate and this usually means adopting features others have borrowed. It’s easy to forget that, for some years after its roll-out in 2006, it was impossible to include an image with a tweet – you could only link to a picture hosted elsewhere and you had to be careful over how long URLs were.