What Can You Do with the Increased Twitter Character Limit?

Twitter has been making the news lately.  In some instances, not for good reason.  Many are upset about the 280 character limit. And well, that does give us reason to question the platform.  But this character limit increase allows us to do a lot of new and exciting things – including the ability to play board games through Twitter.  Who isn’t saying “yah”?  What are people playing exactly?  Well, Connect Four appears to be among the first board game to make its debut on Twitter.  While that first match was a draw, it opens up the possibilities for other games.

It doesn’t stop there. Unicode supports small graphical representations of chess pieces in both colors.  When it comes to organizing the board, some find the “white shogi piece” Unicode symbol: ☖, worked best for representing blank spaces. While there are plenty of “white box”-type characters, none seemed to be the same width as the chess pieces.

How does it work exactly?  The grid and pieces are represented by Unicode characters, which makes it roughly analogous to a grid board.  I am personally not really good at any board games, so I wouldn’t excel in the Twitter versions.  But it is kind of neat, don’t you think?  I mean it’s all so simple, and yet kind of amazing at the same time.  When I say it’s simple, I just mean that it isn’t very high tech.  Or at all.

So what else are people doing with this new character tweet length? Someone tweeted the William Carlos Williams poem, “This is Just to Say” and it is also amazing.:

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center decided to expand their limit showing stars, the moon, Earth and a satellite strewn across its tiny tweet celebrating the change.  Keith Boykin (@keithboykin) tweeted about the election this past Tuesday:

Voters today chose
-2 new Democratic governors
-2 black lieutenant governors
-2 transgender officials
-A Black Lives Matter lawyer as DA in Philly
-A Sikh mayor in Hoboken
-A socialist in Virginia
-To oust GOP mayor in Atlantic City
-And to expand Medicaid in Maine#280characters

A lot of people (and organizations) are tweeting several lines of randomness.  In some cases, its emojis, like hamburgers.  Either way, it’s not very cool.  Maybe my favorite though – Andre Black Nerd (@BlackNerd) tweeted:

Life is like a hurricane
Here in Duckburg
Race cars, lasers, aeroplanes
It’s a duck blur
Might solve a mystery
Or rewrite history@DuckTales (woo-oo)
Everyday they’re out there making #DuckTales (woo-oo)
Tales of daring-do bad and good
LuckTales (woo-oo)#280characters

Some argued that this change to 280 characters was going to turn Twitter into Facebook, but I don’t think it will. I think people are used to putting out short tweets, which is why this change won’t be that big of a deal.  I do hope it doesn’t turn into Instagram where people sometimes post 1000 words (not just characters). I find that kind of annoying so I’m ok with the increase in the tweet limit, let’s just not go overboard.