There has been a lot of talk regarding Twitter’s decision to go beyond the 140 character limit… by adding another 9860.

It doesn’t mean that you have to scroll through 10k character tweets as everything past the first 140 characters will be hidden. The other important thing to mention is that according to some, this is an attempt to lock-in users. More will stay on Twitter to read content instead of going to the linked website.

Platform lock-in is a myth that will fuck so many companies — humans actually seek variety and are absurdly fickle about how they see / read

— Joshua Topolsky (@joshuatopolsky) January 5, 2016

I would reword and say that it is an increasing myth. We have had and still have several companies that achieve a certain level of lock-in. But it is not a hard lock, more like a convenience lock.

Consider for example Apple’s app ecosystem. Buying a new phone is not a problem but losing hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of apps si not something a user will easily be determined to do.

Even in Apple’s case, they could only afford to impose or institute a platform lock in because of their initial “blue ocean” when the first iPhone came out.

The users’ expectations are changing to the point where they expect and demand and consider it as a given that they can port their data and settings when switching services and when it becomes a basic expectation of every service, that is when we will go from myth to impossible.