Twitter Paradoxically Fails
Twitter is (probably) becoming an entirely different service in the future by allowing more than 140 characters.
I’ve been using Twitter for many years (twitter.com/bencollins - sorry Stig) and I’ve been openly critical of the company in the past, but haters gonna hate and so what? Truth is, I love Twitter in some ways, so this is my hate-love letter to them.
Oddly enough, before Twitter existed, I invented a similar service based around the idea of hyperlocal alerts (AMBER alerts, “my cat is lost,” whatever) delivered via the email-t0-sms gateway, so in a way maybe I’m just subconsciously jealous.
People seem to have forgotten WHY Twitter forces you to use 140 characters. When the renowned cast of This Week in Google talked about it recently, no one mentioned what I thought was completely relevant: its origins.
Twitter came out before Apps. You had to send a text to 40404 or something like that - it’s hard to remember. The point is, it floated on the SMS system; it literally existed as text messages and an extremely simple website.
As technology started to improve, I saw the writing on the wall and started asking
Why are we limited to these characters when SMS is going away?
It got to the point very quickly that I thought the service was utterly absurd and was doomed to fail. First there was @ replies. Then came #hashtags. And links. And photos. It became increasingly difficult to communicate coherent ideas within the limitations.
But the irony is, that’s what is so special about Twitter.
Even though they COULD have expanded the character count years ago, something strange had happened: Twitter created an entirely new form of editing and content creativity and curation.
Tweets are an art form.
And now, in spite of this fact, we are being “freed” from the limitations that made it as interesting as it was frustrating. In a very real way, I think Twitter will essentially die as a result. At least, in terms of not existing in a meaningful form that separates it from the billions of other feed-driven social networks.
Searching Twitter is my preferred use of the service. I think it’s phenomenal. Wild. Raw. It takes skill to follow a current event and pick out insights you can’t find on CNN. Reddit Live is a new kind of take on this, introducing a new value metric in terms of karma, but I will take my unfiltered real time Twitter search results over anything online when something big and interesting is happening.
As Twitter searches for new revenue models, pivots because of growth demands and pushy Board members, “evolves” and starts to change more drastically, will it finally actually fail?
In terms of their own brand narrative, they aren’t discussing this on their blog yet. Their mission is somewhat vague:
To give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.
If you look at the current design of their About page, you would think that it’s a photo sharing service. In my view, there has been something of schizophrenia and indecisiveness at Twitter. When you make a product that nets you hundreds of millions of dollars during the IPO when it is actively losing money, how is it possible to stay sane?
According to the New York Times, the latest numbers are still red, not black. Oh well, I may not be a Twitter fanatic, but I don’t ever want to see Twitter search disappear, no matter how many characters it ends up being.
#goodlucktwitter
