Fixing Twitter. From Someone Who Doesn’t Know What They’re Talking About.

I don’t like Twitter, but I want to. It’s interface isn’t horrible by itself but once I start to follow a bunch of people who I have interest in (mostly famous people I don’t know personally) it gets very cluttered and hard to look at, in my opinion.

I heard a rumor that they were thinking of raising the character limit from 140 to 10,000. Now that’s a significant jump. I think it might help someone who shares my view of Twitter, but it would turn it into a blog essentially. I don’t know if that would help with sorting out the feed but I think it’s interesting to go that direction.

My thought is this: a picture is worth a 1000 words (Characters). Limit users to a picture with, maybe the old 140 character limit OR 1000 characters. To give an idea of what 1000 characters looks like…

“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Praesent interdum dignissim leo in maximus. Fusce rutrum, nunc a euismod cursus, tortor ante posuere nisi, eu mattis arcu lorem vel velit. Donec eleifend aliquam est, et varius massa semper eget. In vel libero eget lacus dictum pharetra. Aliquam in ligula non orci rhoncus consequat. Quisque nulla sem, faucibus at nibh sit amet, mollis faucibus arcu. Ut scelerisque massa id nunc scelerisque, vel interdum dui vehicula. Curabitur pretium molestie efficitur. Duis semper mauris ligula, in hendrerit nunc dignissimqs Nullam accumsan, orci at eleifend faucibus, neque leo bibendum velit, id tempor tellus nisi commodo nisl. Aliquam euismod justo at nisi congue porttitor. Sed mattis dapibus risus quis laoreet. Vivamus accumsan lectus consequat auctor dictum. Praesent vel tincidunt augue, eget vehicula est. Cras laoreet malesuada massa, finibus porttitor augue congue sit amet. Cras vitae velit mattis, tincidunt neque quis, bibendum volutpat.”

So you’re allowed a bit of ranting but you should still hold the younger (read: shorter attention span) user's attention. I think it should be enough of a limit to allow a poster to not have to use weird shorthand that might alienate new users. Bringing the photo into it brings about the the possibility of competing with Instagram if handled correctly. Will it overtake Instagram, no no no. But it could develop a solid user base if the character limit actually brings people on board.

So that’s my two cents. I use Twitter a very little bit so I’m sure I’m not the best one to “fix” it, nor do I think my fix is a 100% complete blueprint for making Twitter the next Facebook, but I’m sure I represent a good number of users that feel the same.