Twitter Char Cap
Twitter leads news because it is brief, the brevity is what gives it the lightening bolt. Facebook (scobleizer) maybe a great platform to be on, but it won’t be a livewire in news world unless there is nugget-sized-post version of it coming.
The character length cap is what keeps it live. Dave Winer of all would know it, he does live-blogging. No one would read a live-blog if it is updating on an event para by para. The live-blog has latency limitations, it has to reach the user, which he then reads, comprehends and updates his version of plot in the mind, all while next update is ajaxing on his screen. Same process applies to Twitter. Live-blogs and Twitter certainly do differ, for in a live-blog you are tuned to a socket. Twitter is popular because people use it to stay updated on things whether news, politics, sports or tech. It is convenience at its best, same as you are scanning headlines in a newspaper and when you find what you are looking for, you delve right into it. 140 character limit forces people to be concise, a.k.a “skip to content”, you get to make your pitch in 140 char, hence you have to cram in the important stuff, no beating around the bush. In other words Twitter is an outliner, you have to tell story in few words.
And why do you think people do Twitter and not blogging? Because in part writing small is easy and comes naturally to people.
If 10k comes there will be more spam, more noise, lesser quality, you would say what does an occasional long tweet spoils, I say everything! it will kill the network, pretty soon it will be ruins like google+ or linkedin. And whatever Twitter has built since 2006, that all goes down the drain, of course more organic content on Twitter would mean better ad revenues but you would have lost your bolt, and back to square one, another 10 years to build a notification type service. What we are missing here is that original idea Dorsey had to remain updated of your friends’ current status, that rough blueprint which built what Twitter is today. What would stop people from going full throttle when they have extra characters to use, why would they remain concise, you are already hooked to their pitch why not sell what they have to. This very post.
Eventually we would have best practices to deliver your message across, in same league as SEO.
Yeah we love watching games but not all have the time to pull a chair afront and be glued to the dumb-box. What if tv didn’t show the score in the corner. We had radios before but radio was peripheral, we could keep doing whatever we were doing. Twitter needs our major receptacles occupied.
Dave uses rivers, which are basically enriched streams with full-blown rich content from curated feeds, he is trying to bring that experience to Twitter.
If Buick adds a radio, then so must Dodge and Toyota.
Go ahead add a radio (images, video, quotes) but if you add a trailer to the jeep because trucks have it, you are killing jeep’s USP.
Facebook might be a contenting meal, but Twitter is a snack people relish because they can enjoy it while on the go.