What 280 characters means for Twitter's future

At its core, the internet as we know it exists in a state of permanent contradiction where everything both simultaneously lasts forever and is constantly in flux. 

It's perhaps fitting then that Twitter, the social media service most identified with brevity, has doubled the upper character limit its users can tweet, while at the same time insisting the fundamental change in no way alters its essence.

But can Twitter thrive in this liminal state of concise and verbose, and what does the change mean for a platform that struggles to add real users at the same time it fails to identify and delete fake ones?  Read more...