Aayush Arya is India Editor and Apps Co-Editor at Before I begin, let me make this clear that what I’m about to suggest violates the most basic rule of Twitter and is an idea that will almost certainly never come to fruition. That said, I do think it’s quite an extraordinary one and I would definitely look into it if I were the one with the reigns of Twitter in his hand. But then again, it is my idea, so I guess that’s not saying much.
Twitter has an inflexible maximum character count of 140 for all tweets. If your tweet doesn’t fit within the alloted amount of characters, you can either shorten it (which is a skill not everyone possesses), mutilate it (i.e. spll it lik a 3yr ol), or spread it out over multiple tweets. In my opinion, if you cannot contain an idea within 140 characters, even after shortening it, it’s probably worth more than just a tweet and would perhaps be better expressed in a blog entry.
However, I think it would still be a nice addition to Twitter if the 140 character count was made a little flexible. Faced with this conundrum, most people simply suggest that expanding the maximum character count to 160 will do the trick. I say it won’t. For one thing, it will make all tweets longer, potentially taking Twitter from a casual chat-like service to a more blog-type thing. For another, once we’re at 160, people will just start asking for 200, and there’s really no limit to that.
What I suggest instead is to keep the maximum per tweet character count at 140, but award people who posts tweets shorter than that by carrying forward half of the number of characters they did not use. So if someone posts a tweet that only has 130 characters, his next tweet can have 145 if he wants. If the next tweet then only has 110, his total accumulated bonus characters go up to 5 + (140 - 110) / 2 = 20.
Furthermore, a limit of 500 can be imposed on the maximum number of bonus characters a person can accumulate at any given time and the maximum number of characters a single tweet can contain can be bumped up to 300. What this would do is award people for posting shorter tweets, which would encourage them to do so more often, whilst simultaneously enabling them to be able to post lengthy tweets every once in a while when they absolutely have to.
Like I said, I know it’s quite a departure from the current model of Twitter and is never going to see the light of day. However, once it had occurred to me, I just couldn’t abandon it without sharing it with the world. If you have any thoughts about this, I can be reached at @aryayush. You know what to do—just make sure you stick to the 140 characters!
