OK – Twitter has doubled the number of characters that can be included in a tweet. You now have 280 characters. Two hundred and eighty characters is still not much, but it offers the opportunity to offer more complete thoughts and it is well within the limits of what I would consider a microblog (this used to be a thing – it is difficult for me to regard Twitter as any kind of blog).
Some Twitter users evidently feel that they have been betrayed. They threaten to abandon the service, to unfollow followers who are wordy, and to use extensions that automatically truncate or ignore tweets that extend beyond 140 characters. This all seems silly to me and I have trouble understanding why these folks are so put out. Given all of the inane things that appear on Twitter, the ads, the cat images, and the images of text offered in a way to get around the 140 character limit, these folks are enraged by the limited number of tweets that will be a bit longer. Flexibility is evidently not a virtue to these folks and the split second it takes to scroll on down the list must be a significant intrusion into their very busy lives.