Twitter Needs to Grow Up Or Die
Buzz it
I wrote the following on Twitter today. I was trying to make a point about Twitter’s character limitations:
1. Twitter’s 140 character limitation encourages incomplete thoughts and/or abuse of obscure and meaningless short-forms (IYKWIM)…
2. It’s a challenge (or even impossible) to limit our thoughts to only 140 characters, so we continue writing over several tweets like I am here…
3. The character limitation makes Twitter ineffective to communicate what I really want to say. So why bother?
————————————————– end of communication —————————————————-
Perhaps this isn’t the best of illustrations, but hopefully you can see that because of the stringent character limitation I felt compelled to carry my thoughts over several tweets.
Now imagine trying to follow me on your Twitter home page. Especially if you have thousands of ‘friends’ who are all tweeting at the same time!
My tweets might have appeared disjointed and out of context. You would need to visit my Twitter homepage and read the time-line to understand the point I was really trying to make.
Think back on all the messages you’ve read when you had no clue what the writer was saying because they tried to cram too much into just a few characters. Even at the best of times we can find it difficult to put our ideas into words with an infinite number of characters available.
So how on earth can we expect to convey it all in only 140 characters?
I thought social networking was supposed to make it easy for us to socialize? Sure, the 140 character limitation helps us to separate Twittering (i.e. micro-blogging) from real blogging, but don’t you think it’s a little too restrictive?
SMS technology is so old school. I thought this was web 2.0?
It might appeal to some who can’t put a sentence together but what about the rest of us? What is the point of a communications tool that severely restricts our ability to communicate? That sounds like a contradiction of terms to me.
Shouldn’t social sites like Twitter be about communicating effectively – correct? And isn’t ease of use the real attraction of Twitter? Not just being a so-called “micro” blogging service.
But other social sites like FriendFeed are just as easy to use and offer much more. I would also argue control over our content is just as important as ease of use. The ability to edit posts, grouping of comments per post in real time, and no 140 character limitation amongst other reasons are why FriendFeed is SO much better than Twitter.
Twitter was the first to capture market share. Everyone jumped on the bandwagon and third-party apps sprung out of nowhere. But Twitter shouldn’t rest on its laurels just because it can.
I’ve often complained Twitter totally sucks as a conversation tool. Twitter can be so much more than for just telling you what I’m doing or being spammed. Surely we can have better conversations than that.
Twitter still has some growing up to do. Ya think?
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I agree. As I noted yesterday if Douglas Adams was still alive Twitter’s 140 char limit would form the basis of a joke to write a novel around. Even more ironically there’s just no way IMNSHO that anyone can sensibly handle the stream of SMSs if Twitter is actually sent to your cell.
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@Mike .. I’m surprised there aren’t more comments here. Perhaps everyone loves Twitter just the way it is.
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Blog Bloke (@blogbloketips) reply on July 29th, 2009 4:14 pm:
I never use it so I have no comment. -t
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@Teri,
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Blog Bloke (@blogbloketips) reply on July 30th, 2009 5:51 pm:
I have a team of monkeys doing most of my tweeting. Actually, that’s not true. My company uses Twitter to advance a lot of stories germane to the projects we work on, and I try to keep my twitter feed relatively updated on issues that are important to me. Now that Twitter will be expanding into the search engine market, I’m guessing it will become overstretched and will be swamped when the next big thing in social networking comes around.
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@Mouli Cohen, comparing Twitter to similar apps is like DOS and Windows.
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Blog Bloke (@blogbloketips) reply on July 30th, 2009 5:50 pm:
It has taken me a long time to become comfortable with Twitter, mainly because of the disjointed conversations. I’ve incorporated a chat box page into my blog to encourage conversation amongst members. Hopefully it will catch on.
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@Sherryd, I also put my tweets in the sidebar but I’m using a custom json script that I made. The other benefit besides showcasing your twitter page is it adds more content to your blog.
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@Blog Bloke, do you mean javascript? Just wondering as obviously that means the search engines wouldn’t see it.
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@Mike, json is a lightweight subset of javascript. The output of my tweets can be read by the search engines from here.
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Blog Bloke (@blogbloketips) reply on July 30th, 2009 6:55 pm:
Mike (@blogbloketips) reply on July 30th, 2009 6:16 pm:
Blog Bloke (@blogbloketips) reply on July 30th, 2009 5:46 pm:
@Sherryd, i know, i dont understand it sometimes. My company wants me to use it for our to keep our members up to date with updates to the social network but i find it to be dumb. with 140 letters, i cant even speak in less than 8 words…i tend to be kinda chatty
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Julia (@blogbloketips) reply on October 9th, 2009 8:47 am:
Hi .. just came across your blog. It’s great! I’ve bookmarked this for reference!
Subscribed as well!
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@lyla, thanks Lyla
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Blog Bloke (@blogbloketips) reply on August 7th, 2009 1:21 pm:
I saw this problem too and I can never write all the things that I want to. I think the same, they have to change a lot of things soon for the better !!!
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@belbet Ruiz, it’s unfortunate that Twitter relies on a multitude of third-party apps to make it palatable. Have you tried this http://www.twitlonger.com/ ?
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Blog Bloke (@blogbloketips) reply on August 7th, 2009 1:22 pm:
Twitter want to the pulse of the Planet so it will plan about future.
How can you say it will die?
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@Surender Sharma, I think it’s arrogant for Twitter to want to be the “pulse” of the planet when you consider that most of the planet still don’t have personal computers. My point I’m trying to make here is Twitter is built on old school (SMS) technology and needs to improve.
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Blog Bloke (@blogbloketips) reply on September 23rd, 2009 2:08 pm:
i dont like twitter, and from what i see can help to much. I cant say the same thing about digg or things like digg
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@FunnyMouse, that is of course if your blog host servers can handle the load.
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Blog Bloke (@blogbloketips) reply on September 23rd, 2009 2:12 pm:
Yeah you are right .But it is a just a micro blogging site only.we have to share our tweets in a single phrase.
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Twitter’s format allows you to absorb a ton of information really quickly. I might read your tweet, but not your blog. Your tweet is going to have to be interesting enough to get me to read your blog.
Tweeting also forces you to write concisely - condensing an entire thought into 140 characters. Being able to concisely convey a thought makes you a better communicator.
Many people’s blog posts turn into rambling rants. Tweeting one continuous thought over multiple tweets is a sign that you are misusing twitter. Perhaps you could write a blog post and tweet a link to it? Rather than three major points, as you used in your example, why not select your BEST point and tweet that out. It’s not about limiting your thoughts to 140 characters, it’s about selecting the correct medium to share your thoughts.
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