

How Twitter Could Win Local - iamvictorious
http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/22/7-ways-twitter-could-be-winning-local/

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dstein
Twitter's self imposed 140 char limit has limited their options in a lot of
ways. Twitter should have dropped that a long time ago. Or at least not count
hashtags, geotags, or urls against the 140 limit. This would've opened a lot
doors to add more context to tweets.

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carbonica
It also bugs me that @refs count against the limit. When I come across 3
developers having a conversation and I'd like to chime in, I'm already down to
<120 chars just by including their names. And since Twitter's model means they
can't reasonably find out about my tweet if I don't put their name in it, the
more people you want to talk with, the less you can say.

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palish
You say that like it's a bad thing.

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carbonica
That's because it is.

Going from blog posts and mailing lists to 140 character messages was a real
change in communication. Going from 140 characters to 110, because a couple of
people have long twitter IDs, is just being a pain in the ass. I already
compressed the point of my message to 140 characters, why isn't that good
enough?

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palish
Mm... Fair point. It just seems like another fundamental change to allow
twitter messages to go to >5 people at a time. What would be the limit then?
Ten people? A hundred?

Maybe limiting the number of people _at all_ is a bad thing. Who knows.

But messing with their Formula That Works may be a bad thing.

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kml
I agree, Twitter has all the right pieces to make something of local.

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tobylane
The most important thing about local tweets is that you can refine search
results to your country/area. I just tried, on the website and on the iphone
app, I couldn't.

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thwarted
Refining search to your current location seems to work in the twitter android
app. I just found out about some senior class trip and a guy looking for a
beach with parking in South Lake Tahoe.

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graiz
Translation. Do what FourSquare should be doing, just don't suck at it.

