Richard MacManus over at ReadWriteWeb posted an article today detailing Why Twitter Must Expand Beyond 140 Characters. This is a counter post detailing the opposite.

Twitter No Longer About Constraints

Twitter and Facebook are not in competition, they serve two very different functions. Twitter is for following brief status updates from people and things you’re interested in, while Facebook is for sharing your life with close friends and family in an efficient detached manner.

That Extra Click: The User Experience Issue

There is a user experience issue with having to click a link to read tweets that are longer than 140 characters; but the issue isn’t with Twitter, it’s with the external service which is not a good fit for Twitter. Having to click to get extra content—ie: Twitter’s simplicity (and it’s open API), is what made it so successful and able to have such a vibrant ecosystem of apps and experiences. The new Twitter layout solves a significant amount of extra clicks showing plenty of externally linked media from tweets on the Twitter website without leaving the experience.

Will Twitter Producers Pollute Twitter With Long Tweets?

It’s irrelevant how often people post long tweets. Twitter can’t drop the 140 character limit because it was designed to be used with SMS. Many people still write and read tweets via SMS on their mobile phone, and allowing longer tweets wouldn’t solve anything. Those people would still be limited to only 140 characters, and any tweets longer than 140 characters would be sent to their mobile phone all wonky and separated or broken up.

Other Languages Already Send Long Messages on Twitter

This just refutes the last point. But it also provides a solution, if you want longer tweets, learn Chinese.

Twitter Needs to Expand Beyond 140 Characters to Continue Growing

This is just false. Twitter’s brevity is it’s value as the character limit urges elegance, and allows it to be integrated beautifully with even small simple devices and web apps. Twitter is in the middle of transitioning to the new layout, and there’s a ton of room for Twitter to expand in terms of analysis and practical uses of their vast sums of data.

Twitter keeps hitting record usage levels and their service is becoming more and more mainstream as it becomes popular around the world. More important than character limits is expanding their infrastructure for uptime ie: they can barely handle 140 characters, but perhaps more importantly for access.

Being able to Tweet from anywhere in the world in the face of a government shutting down the internet – via SMS and Google Voice, and perhaps in the future self healing P2P networks is a must. Getting an image of your country’s secret police force throwing molotov cocktails at protestors from rooftops to the world is at the very least facilitated by the fact that there are hundreds of services that easily integrate with Twitter and a hundred different ways of getting an image like that onto many different services and getting the Tweet out. If Twitter starts expanding to overshadow its simplistic ecosystem as a status distribution network, preventing posting of such pictures to a mass audience will simply mean blocking the twitter website. All your eggs in one basket.