Remember when announcements were kind of a big deal? It doesn’t seem like that long ago for those of us who make our living in one of the marketing communications fields. In fact, we game plan for big announcements, in big rooms, with big wigs to make things a big deal. It’s just what we do. Or so it seemed.

In the past we would spend big dollars, tie in an A-list celebrity to our campaign, hold a press conference, rent out a large bar too, and VOILA – we made news. It was how it was done, clients were happy, it was great and we were all good at it.

Then this happened! The announcement equivalent of a tree falling in the woods and no one hearing it. Twitter very quietly announced that they’ve made some common sense “about time” tweaks to the way character counts are figured out. No longer will the @ someone count against your character count. The company Twitter account tweeted, “We’re changing the replies so that you have all 140 characters to express yourself.”

This is pretty great news. It seems that a chief complaint among Twitter users is the limitations of the 140-character count that makes it difficult to articulate what we are trying to say in such a limited fashion. And it would make sense for this to be a much bigger announcement, except it wasn’t. Oh, well opportunity lost.