Twitter Outgrows The 140-Character Standard

Give Team Twitter their due: for all Facebook developers' collective complex that Mark Zuckerberg's golden goose must become a grander and grander clusterf**k every five minutes in order to thrive, that little bird has been the apex social media predator that's had to evolve astonishinglyh little since 2006.

Here's your 140 characters. Do with 'em what you will.

Every so often, even the top of the food chain needs to change up its game.

As reported Wednesday by Slate - after a rambling, smug, three-paragraph "I told you so" intro by the author that's almost as long as some of my complete postings on this site - the microblogging network has announced the gradual introduction of "expanded tweets." The new feature ever so slightly fudges the 140-character wall and allows a "View Summary" button to let followers preview linked content. It looks a little something like this:

Think of it as a more official take on tweet-expanding hacks like TwitLonger that take messages over 140 characters and link to the full tweet with a compact URL.

The formatted is available currently to only select accounts - among them, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, BuzzFeed, TMZ and WWE.

So, tell us what you think below. Is this a step in the right direction for Twitter to broaden its horizons, and what its users can do with it? Or could it merely needlessly complicate the service's attractive brevity in its content?