Twitter adds line breaks, draws mixed response

IDG News Service - Do

you

find

this

annoying

to

read?

If so, you might not like the design change that was just made to Twitter.

The social network has added the ability to incorporate line breaks into tweets. The change was announced Wednesday in a tweet that, naturally, includes line breaks:

"Guess what you can do

View line breaks on Twitter web

Let the fun begin"

But how much fun users will have depends on whom you ask.

"Twitter has added line breaks. How annoying is this gonna be?" tweeted Kate Day, social media and engagement editor for The Telegraph, in another line-broken tweet.

The feature is an unexpected addition to a service that's designed to provide a clean stream of short, 140-character posts.

"It gives people a way to put emphasis and perhaps more emotion into their tweets, and to do some other interesting things as well," such as write poems, said Greg Sterling, an analyst with Opus Research.

"I guess the haiku lovers out in the world are happy today," said Gartner analyst Brian Blau.

However, the feature might also be abused, Sterling said. "If there's an uprising over it, Twitter will roll it back quickly."

The line breaks work in the Web version of Twitter, and in the iOS and Android apps, but not currently in TweetDeck.

Zach Miners covers social networking, search and general technology news for IDG News Service. Follow Zach on Twitter at @zachminers. Zach's e-mail address is zach_miners@idg.com