

Crash Tags - yawn
http://www.holovaty.com/writing/crashtags/

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tptacek
A defiantly nerdy take on Twitter. I appreciate it for what it is, but I don't
agree. Twitter and its constraints aren't silly.

An arbitrary and mostly-irrelevant technical limitation is responsible for the
140 character limit. But, it turns out that limit or no, 140 character
messages have utility. Forced summarization means that you can benefit from
updates from hundreds of people simultaneously.

Compare Twitter to the Facebook feed (I follow a comparable number of people
on both). In neither case can I reasonably consume 100% of the stream. That's
OK. But: I am objectively capable of benefiting from a far larger percentage
of the Twitter stream than I am of the Facebook stream. I go two or three
pages down Facebook and I'm saturated. I could never in a million years pay
attention to it all day; I dip into it maybe 2-3 times a week.

The fact that Twitter sort-of works for this broadcast-y use case means that
is sane to build things on it, like news services, or conference CFPs, or
recruitments for open-enrollment classes, or announcements for new blog posts.

There are clearly things Twitter has wrong, and hashtags and inband metadata
are clearly at the top of the list. But that doesn't make Twitter silly. The
Twitter team apparently didn't know Twitter was going to work this well when
they started it. It isn't some crazy scheme to trick the linkerati. They're
still catching up to what they unleashed and I'm inclined to cut them some
slack.

~~~
pak
The thing is, I don't see any effort by Twitter to try to separate the inband
metadata, except for what they did with in_reply_to (which continues to have
problems). They should have done exactly the same for hashtags, URLs, and
pictures a long time ago. As a result, URL shorteners have spread across the
web like a disease and tweets are #goddamn #liketotally #nearunreadable
<http://bit.ly/mjSZ1G> now, unless you have a client that gets rid of the junk
for you. I don't see the top-down, platform-level vision from Twitter about
how they'll _innovate_ and make the UX better, instead I just see them sucking
up all the startups that built products around their service.

You can make a better UX for a broadcasting service than by having people
squeeze more characters in by switching to a tinier URL shortener and using
sillier hashtags. I'm hoping to see some movement that actually indicates they
know what a problem this is.

~~~
tptacek
Let's all agree to agree:

* URLs shouldn't count towards the 140 character limit.

* Tags should be out-of-band

Having said that, I read and write twerps every day. Most of the people I
follow use hashtags only in an ironic sense, and I never pay attention to
them. I agree that they are poorly engineered for their problem domain (but
again: I cut Twitter a lot of slack on this), but I am not kidding: Twitter is
more useful than Facebook, with its rich out-of-band metadata and commenting
features, on a daily basis, to my business. I would be unhappy if Facebook-
style messaging replaced Twitter.

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wccrawford
In the comments of one of the links there, someone suggests adding Circles to
the post, even if it's already public, as a way to simulate hashtags.

I like that, but the problem is that nobody else can see what circles you
published to. (Which is probably how it should be, so they can't figure out
how you've organized people. It's a privacy concern.)

~~~
pavel_lishin
"This stomach flu sure sucks, you guys [shared with #work]"

"Awesome kegger last night, breauxs! Can't believe I did twenty shots! [shared
with #alphabetagamma]"

------
slowernet
#constraints #value #cognition #paradoxofchoice

------
marquis
I look forward to seeing how G+ solves this, it's my core issue right now that
I'm getting barraged with photos from people I don't know well. I'm not really
into seeing random photos of food, whatever, but I like what they have to say
when they actually post text. I also see G+ being like Twitter in that you can
engage with the community on core topics rather than having to know who to
follow. I'm sure I'm missing out right now on great conversations because I
don't know who's posting them.

I'd also like to be able to use G+ as my blog on certain topics that some
friends care about, but not enough for me to reach out to them and ask if
they'd like to be in my 'postings about this topic' circle.

------
lancefisher
The 140 character limit is actually a nice feature. It's like reading a stream
of headlines rather than parsing articles and animated gifs. G+'s circles are
kind of a pain to manage and post to. In addition, they ruin the serendipity
that you find in your twitter stream. For example, discovering that a
programmer acquaintance also enjoys running or one of your favorite bands.

I'm not saying that G+ is going to fail, but it doesn't make twitter archaic
or obsolete.

------
yuhong
The title made me think of HTML tags.

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funkah
140 is a feature, not a bug. But anyway, hashtags have nothing to do with the
character limit, and everything to do with search and conversation. They make
it easy to find people all talking about the same subject, with no group setup
or other configuration beforehand.

I know a lot of nerds hate Twitter because they think it's "for the cool kids"
or whatever, but this is silly.

