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.
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.
* 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.
It strikes me as a study of depth vs. breadth. FB (and RSS) offer depth, i.e. deeper, longer content, where Twitter offers breadth, i.e. more potential sources.
But I feel like these are not mutually exclusive, and also not optimal to be separated/siloed onto different services.
Esp. considering the fact that, for me at least, Twitter is often, or even largely, just another feed. The in-message text serves as a subject line and there's a link to a post where the real content is. This bothers me because it's just a crappier version of rss.
Seems to me that a service like Google+ can do everything twitter does, without the limitations, given the right UI and some sort of filter system.
For example, imagine Google+, with everything collapsed except a subject line. For posts without subject lines, substitute the first n characters with an ellipsis. Add a little arrow for posts that have body texts. Now you have twitter, except you can open links in-line by hitting the arrow. Simple tweets are just subject lines.
Now imagine a filter option so you can see simple tweets in one stream and linked tweets (i.e. longer posts) in another. The tweetstream is for real-time messaging and brief quips. The full post stream is for what I still use RSS for.
That's just my top-of-the-head first take on the problem.
Ideally, this would all be service-agnostic/interoperable. But maybe that would just be RSS. So maybe I'm just asking for a better UI for real-time RSS.
It just doesn't mean anything at all to me to hear what Google "could" do. Google "could" do a note-for-note cover of Twitter, and then fix Twitter's metadata and API problems to make it easier to build apps on. They "could" invent something even nicer than Twitter. They "could" come up with the magic feather that integrates Twitter-style messaging into Google search. They have a zillion dollars. They "could" do anything.
They have not replaced Twitter, or even come close to meaningfully competing with it.
Google+ is not a note-for-note cover of Twitter. There are things that are nicer about it, and there are things it does that Twitter can't do at all, but that doesn't mean any of those things are critical to Twitter's key value proposition.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.