Legend has it that, in the First Age of social networks, between the middle and the end of the first decade of the 21st century, there was a social network called Twitter that managed to distinguish itself from its competition with a clearly minimalist proposal. The oldest of the place 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.
Over time, however, Twitter has been giving up its main hallmark, what made it special. It is true that there are still some limitations, such as the maximum size of messages being 280 characters, but it is enough to compare a standard timeline from those early years with a current one to see, very clearly, that the appearance of the Twitter timeline and the of Facebook are more and more similar every day.
For some time now, in addition, Twitter seems to have stepped on the accelerator in terms of adding new functions, Twitter Circle, featured replies, activity indicators on the profile, highlighting the author’s Likes, Twitter Notes, service feeds , the CoTweets, the auto-delete of the mentions… and this only in the last few months, and taking into account that we may have skipped other tests, it is the clear sign that the network is definitively breaking with its past and the elements that they defined it. Whether this is good or bad, each user will have to decide based on their own criteria..
Be that as it may, today we know from Gizmodo that Twitter is testing a new function… new on Twitter, because it has been present on other networks like Facebook for years: statuses in conversations. A test that, at least in its first phase, does not seem to be generating special sympathy in some of the users who have already been able to access it, as we can see in tweets like this one
I don’t know how twitter managed to release a more embarrassing and unusable feature than cotweets in the same month but here it is. these are all the statuses you can use. no custom statuses allowed pic.twitter.com/2BPwku1qi1
— Takes Of Vesperia (@coolranchzaku) July 27, 2022
In it we can see that Twitter has opted for a closed formula, that is, a predefined list of states that we can associate with our tweets, sin margin to the creation of custom states, something that might make the feature a bit more interesting. Obviously these states, like the rest of the additional elements that can be added to a tweet, will not be deducted from the 280 characters that each message allows.
