"After all, Twitter is a great big, public conversational platform — the fact that you could follow chats between other users you cared about was part of its draw."<p>Insane. For me it is the complete opposite. Having to read a personal conversation between two people is perhaps the primary reason I do not use Twitter. Far too much noise. And they should count hashtags as double (the other main reason why I cannot stand Twitter).
I almost completely ditched Twitter because I got sick of attempting to condense my thoughts into blurbs a toddler with ADD could understand.<p>On twitter, I have thousands of followers and I'm lucky to get even one reply or mention.<p>On Facebook, however, I have about 300 friends, and I can post an actual paragraph along with a photo or a video. I often get 30 likes and 20 comments on the posts.<p>Facebook does a much better job of facilitating real conversations, and yet it still allows people to post 140 character blurbs (if they want to).<p>I get it though. Twitter is what it is, and there are tons of people who love it. I'm not one of those people.
Removing the ".@" syntax is a mistake. I don't always want to broadcast replies. I still don't understand why URLs are still included within the 140 char limit either. Can someone explain that better than the article?
I don't know if this was the original Techcrunch title, but it is extraordinarily misleading. The proper title is the current article title:<p><i>Twitter moves away from 140 characters, ditches confusing and restrictive rules</i>
I get why this is news to many people, but when you get down to it, a company removed its own arbitrary limitation. It's really difficult to give a shit about such things.<p>EDIT: I'm aware of the original reasoning for the limitation, so perhaps "arbitrary" is not the best adjective.
Interesting move toward the end of the 140 character limit. Let's see how it goes but I'm pretty sure people will still complain about the limitation, until they really ditch it...