Twitter and the signal-to-noise ratio
Twitter has announced that it is testing doubling the length of its iconic 140 character messages. The limitation was originally based on the technical limitations of SMS (at that time, 160 characters), with 20 for usernames, but that restriction has long since ceased to exist. Wired has listed Twitter’s changes over time and come out against the change, putting forward a series of arguments I find perfectly reasonable, and to which I would add one that for some time has led me to prioritize my information diet: signal-to-noise ratio, which is to say, how much useful information there is in a source as a proportion of the entire contents.
Restrictions reasons can be imposed for many reasons: technical, strategic, usability, identity… Announcing the change, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said the 140-character limit was arbitrary, while an entry on the corporate blog noted: “Trying to cram your thoughts into a Tweet — we’ve all been there, and it’s a pain.”
This might be true for some. But at the same time, Twitter’s identity, its personality, its most essential characteristics, including its stinginess is based on the 140-character limit. Agreed: it was a limitation that no longer made sense from a technical perspective, while some languages benefitted: 140 characters in Japanese, Chinese or Korean allows you say much more than Western alphabetic characters.
Did we suffer as a result of the character limit? Not at all. I can’t remember having any problems other than having to briefly reformulate a sentence, something that seemed to me positive: striving to say the same thing in fewer characters. Jack Dorsey’s own tweet could be expressed perfectly well in 140 characters without losing its meaning, and even used as a intended pun for the company for losing a fundamental part of its identity.
Identity is a fundamental characteristic of the social networks, and all are about the same thing: communication. What’s more, following a clear isomorphism pattern, they all look increasingly the same: Facebook’s updates were changed long ago to resemble Twitter’s, Twitter reinterpreted the hearts we used to indicate favorites to turn them into Facebook’s Likes, LinkedIn has carried out similar moves in its notifications… each network has its own strategy, but each is based on certain signs that are central to users being able to distinguish them.
I should admit that I’m not a typical Twitter user. Long ago I decided only to use it to keep abreast of professional developments in certain areas, not to find out what family and friends were up to. LinkedIn serves the same purpose, and in fact, a lot of people do so after it bought Pulse in 2013. If your LinkedIn is well configured, if you have been minimally careful to maintain a mix of contacts and people you follow related to your professional interests, you will find that LinkedIn’s news proposals are usually a must-read. In my case, however, I’ve almost always opted for Twitter. Why? For the above-mentioned signal-to-noise ratio. Opening LinkedIn can be distracting, given the amount of other information it harbors. As soon as I enter the place, I know I have to approve contacts into my network, check the stats of my publications, see my notifications… too many things to do! Don’t get me wrong: I love LinkedIn and I find it extremely useful, but Twitter, instead, provides bite-sized information that puts me in the picture in an instant, in any ten minutes I spend in an Uber ride or waiting for someone.
And if those bites are twice as large, they will be twice as difficult to swallow. Given that the differential feature of Twitter for me was its brevity, I will probably move on to another service, which would be a shame, because I love Twitter and still believe that if it didn’t exist it would have to be invented.
Sincerely, I think that Twitter is making a mistake here, and will simply become noisier and less concise. Twitter: let’s keep those tweets short and sweet: double the size is not necessarily double the fun. Resistance to change? No one has ever accused me of that. But identifying characteristics are something else, and should be carefully nurtured.
(En español, aquí)
