Twitter have recently announced changes to support multiple photos per tweet and tagging of people in photos, changes that bring their service even closer to Facebook/Instagram. What saddens me is the continued shift away from the original concept of a tweet being entirely encapsulated within 140 characters to fit neatly in a SMS. It’s easy to see why, but photos and tagged users will be hidden in a tweet’s metadata rather than being part of its body. It’s expected that [Twitter will include the new features in the public API](https://twitter.com/TwitterDev/status/448927367369457664) but what else is being planned? Twitter’s @vivian calls hashtags & @s “arcane”: “We are working on moving the scaffolding of twitter into the background” @cwarzel As the above [tweet suggests](https://twitter.com/BuzzFeedBen/status/445580097475448832), other non-text cruft may also be on the way out. If so it’ll be a shame. It’s arguably a welcome move for Twitter’s new users to lower the barrier to entry and bring it closer to Facebook, but I’ll miss the 1:1 relationship between a tweet’s content and its meaning.

Twitter have recently announced changes to support multiple photos per tweet and tagging of people in photos, changes that bring their service even closer to Facebook/Instagram. What saddens me is...