Twitter is short of breadth
The length limit has got to go
Nearly every day, I start to write something on Twitter, run over 140 characters, futilely attempt to trim it down, then give up and delete the entire message. Twitter’s 140 character limit has cinched itself around the company and is choking out any further development.
On the business side of things, I rarely have any problems. Tweets on @agreatbigcity are headlines and short news updates that easily fit within Twitter’s constraints. Most importantly, there’s almost always a link to an external page that will clarify any ambiguities within the shortened “headline speak” of a Tweet. No such luck when actual humans are interacting in 140-character chunks.
It’s in day-to-day personal communication (or, y’know… “social networking”) that Twitter’s shortcomings stifle or impede upon conversations. After squeaking past the character limit and having to go back and edit Tweets, I constantly run up against a process of dumbing down, where any words that don’t have a traditional abbreviation (‘with’ -> ‘w/’) or text-speak equivalent (‘to be honest’ -> ‘tbh’) end up replaced by shorter, less nuanced words. Editing a piece of writing can be a fascinating journey in condensing your thoughts to their most essential morsels, but attempting to start or continue a conversation in 140 characters that communicates some self-contained thought brings the entire site down to the level of insults and misunderstandings, where sentences like “a fascinating journey in condensing your thoughts” are axed and replaced with something short enough to yell out the window of a passing car.
What’s the solution? Only introducing and testing out new ideas can bring an answer. Facebook posts and comments allow greater length, but are certainly not known for facilitating worthwhile conversations. Dave Winer uses a tool to paste text as native Twitter images, Medium has their own quoting tool that also puts text as an image, and journalists love to screenshot text, but without Twitter’s intervention, text-as-an-image is a battle against differing screen sizes, with wide, screen-width text images displaying fine on desktop, but unreadable on mobile, and full-page documents displaying with font sizes so small they require wrestling the image into its own tab to zoom in and read.
Twitter users invent and adopt new conventions, and one of the latest is threaded Tweets (skillfully used daily by @alexandraerin), which add some cohesion between a string of Tweets, but can also get bogged down with comments and replies going multiple directions at once. Pasting together a series of Tweets into a Moment is another attempt at expressing longer thoughts, but (so far) is little more than Storify with less options.
Ideally, I still long for the interaction I had on Livejournal circa 2000 or on Potluck circa 2013. Threaded comments and the relatively small community created an environment where you could get to know a diverse set of people as humans, instead of as an endlessly-scrolling stream of soundbites.
Follow me on Twitter @tracegilton, where I will type out a 180 character response to your Tweet, shrink it down to something grammatically questionable, then erase it and hit the “like” button instead.
