Legend has it that in the first age of social networking, between the middle and end of the first decade of the 21st century, there was a social network called Twitter that was able to distinguish itself from the competition with a clearly minimalist design. The oldest of the site remember that if you wanted to publish a message, you had to limit its maximum length to 140 characters, more or less in line with what was offered by another communication system that was very present and active at the time, SMS messages.
However, over time Twitter is giving up its flagship, which made it special. It is true that there are still some limitations, for example the maximum size of messages is 280 characters, but it is enough to compare the standard timeline from those early years with the current one to see very clearly that the appearance of the Twitter timeline and Facebook are more and more similar every day.
Additionally, Twitter seems to have hit the accelerator for a while now in terms of adding new features, Twitter Circle, Suggested Replies, Profile Activity Indicators, Author Like Highlights, Twitter Notes, Service Channels, CoTweets, Auto-Delete Mentions… and only in the last few months, and considering we may have skipped more tests, it’s a clear sign that the network is definitively breaking away from its past and the elements that defined it. Whether this is good or bad, each user will have to decide based on their own criteria..
Be that as it may, we know today from Gizmodo Twitter is testing a new feature… new to Twitter since it’s been around for years on other networks like Facebook: statuses in conversations. A test that, at least in its first phase, doesn’t seem to be particularly sympathetic to some users who already had access to it, as we can see in tweets like this one
In it we can see that Twitter has opted for a closed formula, i.e. a predefined list of statuses that we can assign to our tweets, withon the sidelines to create your own statuses, something that could make this feature a bit more interesting. Obviously, these statuses, as well as other additional elements that can be added to a tweet, will not be deducted from the 280 characters that each message allows.
