I love the new looks and different feel most especially the emojis. Seems their front-end has a lot of updates to make before it can be great for the oldies.
About micro-blogging, definitely there have to be a way to prevent abuse or people would get to spam often placing little to no effort.
We already have plenty of spamming and low quality posts as it is. Microblogging does not mean that it will be a low quality or no effort post.