The 140 character limit arose in a world that doesn't exist anymore. In 2006, SMS was a sensible way to transmit data, phones were mostly dumb, blogs were the way to get your thoughts into the world (but experiencing a backlash, which helped bring Twitter to prominence), and most people interacted with the Internet via a desktop.
Facebook et al have shown that given a blank canvas the majority of people do not suddenly pen 10'000 word screeds. Lifting the 140 character limit will not suddenly lead to an explosion of novellas on Twitter, especially now that most people interact via a mobile (I went to my laptop to write this comment, having read the comments on my mobile.)
The 140 character limit is actively harmful to meaningful discussion, and I believe it fuels much of the anger and abuse that Twitter is known for generating.
Drop the 140 character limit and let me have meaningful conversations with the social network on Twitter. That is, to me, an extremely compelling proposition.
(1427 characters)
Overall though, the 140 limit I find is a better from a Twitter consumer point of view, but is far worse as a participant on Twitter.
There won't be many long posts in any case.
Because Twitter is public by default I know everything I post should not be confidential. No details of my kids, for instance. So it tends towards people presenting their professional persona.
Because it's unidirectional, following someone does not imply any personal relationship (cf Facebook, where links are bidirectional and you only friends IRL friends). This means I can follow someone without fear of rejection, and likewise I can gain followers without opening myself up to all my followers' content.
With this I can read someone's posts for a while, and comment when I have a feel for them + have something interesting to say.
I don't agree with the other comments that 140 is some magic number. I also don't agree that forcing people to shorten their message is a good thing or adds anything. Lots of things can't be shortened to 140 characters. Lots of people post 3-9-12 tweets in a row to try to make their point or post pictures of text or whatever to get around the limit. If you knew you could write as much as you want but only the top 140 characters would appear "above the line" people would still try to give you enough info in that first 140 characters for you to decide if you want to click "more..."
Bite-sized tweets are a 'feature' for the company itself, because ideally, they can be surfaced out-of-context (like on an algorithmicially jumbled timeline or some aggregator page), and can be seamlessly intermixed with promoted content.
When it was brand-new, Twitter was unique and had a differentiating format. Today, Instagram is the closest analogue except the image and caption are flipped for maximum visual appeal, and that format has seriously infringed on the marketshare (and use-cases) of Twitter by attracting a certain type of content-producer; one that appeals to the coveted 18-30 crowd.
You get 140 characters that will show up as someone scrolls through tweets normally.
Then you're free to type up as much as you want assuming someone's willing to click your tweet to see the full version.
You can do that with Fb pages, Medium, blogs, etc, etc.
> The 140 character limit is an archaic relic that I believe is harmful to Twitter.
You are wrong. Twitter was barely used with SMS.
The limit (now) is a product choice, not a technological one.
It has a fairly unique place in the whole social media constellation and has long term viability. So what if it didn't become the #1 go to place for everything and anything.
Concentrate on that core, make it work flawlessly and keep a good balance between commerce and utility. Better that than selling out to Facebook or Google, guard that independence.
Not following too many people is great, because the people you follow will curate the interesting stuff for you and re-tweet it. Stop following all media accounts for instance, maybe follow a couple reporters instead and you'll still catch all the interesting stories.
If un-following is socially awkward for whatever reason, mute people you follow or at least toggle off re-tweets for those that do too many.
I read my whole timeline most every day and it's great. It does take regular pruning though, like a plant in your garden.
Since Twitter does not seem to be highly successful at existing advertising models, perhaps some resources could be dedicated to a small team that can move quickly and launch a new service by Jan 2017, so that a payment experiment can run for a couple of quarters before D-Day arrives in July 2017? If any innovative revenue-generating projects are planned, please involve the diehard users who would be lost if Twitter went away. They have much to offer, despite painful memories of API/developer changes and other missteps. There are loyal users who want Twitter to succeed as an independent entity, one that can chart an independent model for social media.
[1] Flattr: favoriting tweets to allocate funds, https://blog.flattr.net/2013/04/twitter-is-forcing-us-to-dro...
[2] Brave: browser metrics to allocate Bitcoin funds, https://brave.com/blogpost_3.html
[3] Blendle: pay-per-article with instant refunds, http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/03/testing-its-pay-per-article...
[4] Patreon, recurring subscriptions to crowdfund creators, http://www.billboard.com/articles/business/6502119/patreon-t...
If you want to grab part of a market you are pretty much not part of or modernize your century old empire you will consider buying number two.
No 2 is already quite expensive. And if you are already the market leader grabbing more does not yield a value that corresponds with the price. And in the end making some return on your investment is always quite a big factor.
Personal/Family/Friends: Facebook
Professional/Business: Linkedin
Celebrity/Gossip/Politics: Twitter
I have a twitter account but who cares what I tweet. No one really unless I am a celebrity or a famous politician.
Twitter is where friends/personal stuff happens. You should find a community beyond the stuff they push at sign up. There's so much there beyond celebrities, gossip, and politics.
But if you're not excited by conversations about legal implications of safety harness design or improvements to cardboard box manufacturing processes, then you probably wouldn't enjoy LinkedIn....
With a leveraged buyout, you can go as low as 20% in cash and finance the rest with loans you put on Twitter's balance after the acquisition.
Or the acquiring company can issuing new shares and using those to pay Twitter shareholders.
Google or Facebook could buy Twitter for cash, but it's not clear it would be a good investment. It would be better to wait for Twitter to fail and then pick up the pieces at a huge discount.
I think complaining about message length on Twitter is like complaining that you can't place video calls on Instagram.
They should buy flattr and build it in.
"... while Facebook and WhatsApp measure growth by the number of daily and monthly active users on their networks, WeChat cares more about how relevant and central WeChat is in addressing the daily, even hourly needs of its users. Instead of focusing on building the largest social network in the world, WeChat has focused on building a mobile lifestyle — its goal is to address every aspect of its users’ lives, including non-social ones. The way it achieves this goal is through one of the most unsurfaced aspects of WeChat: the pioneering model of “apps within an app”. Millions (note, not just thousands) of lightweight apps live inside WeChat, much like webpages live on the internet. This makes WeChat more like a browser for mobile websites, or, arguably, a mobile operating system — complete with its own proprietary app store. Not what we’d expect from a messaging app.."
If Twitter can create a revenue channel for creators and developers, then (re)open the platform to third-party developers, they can unlock dormant economic potential in both the platform and customer base. The advertising ("own the user experience") experiment has run its course, it's time to try business models which build on Twitter's unique identity platform.
For armchair quarterbacks like us, it's hard for us to mindread Larry Page's ultimate plans. That said, Chris Sacca has an interesting theory on why Larry wouldn't be that interested in Twitter.[1] Chris isn't just a random talking head. He worked at Google to buy datacenters for Larry Page during its explosve growth stage and is also one of Twitter's biggest outside shareholders. He's now a billionaire angel investor.
His comments are from 2012 but I believe it's still relevant 4 years later. The tl;dw: Twitter isn't an interesting "science problem" for Google to solve.
I haven't studied the list of Google's acquisitions extensively but it doesn't seem like they have a pattern of acquiring companies for the databases of user accounts.
[1] relevant excerpt is 4m45ss - 10m51s : https://youtu.be/SK4ezQrTqFw?t=4m45s
- Google already has two-and-a-half social networks (Youtube, Google+, Blogger) if you don't count their ever-relaunching chat apps (Hangouts, Allo, Duo)
- they don't need Twitter to innovate, they don't need them to stay relevant, and they don't need Twitter's presence on phones because they (Google) are likely also present on mobile devices
- they are still the leader in display ads, Twitter is distant third behind Facebook [1], and Facebook has absorbed most of the growth in the last year, but now that AOL and Yahoo have merged (both now owned by Verizon), it's possible that Twitter is fourth behind them (I'll try to confirm with sources)
On a defensive purchase:
- Facebook, Amazon (Twitch), Microsoft, and Verizon are Google's largest threats in the social/ads/attention space; Google dwarfs them all except Facebook. As I've said above, Verizon is the up-and-coming ad network and they stand the most to gain by (approximately) doubling their share, but even if they do so they still won't be a meaningful threat to Google in the near future.
- Snapchat, despite being a serious threat to Facebook (mostly to their subsidiary Instagram), isn't actually a threat to Google -- it infringes on next to no capability that one could enjoyable do with Google's services. This remains unchanged even with Google's new phone-number-bootstrapped chat and video apps, Allo and Duo, which exist primarily to compete with iMessage/Facetime and WhatsApp
- Someone with the most to gain from buying Twitter would be a relative outsider who wants to enter the social space, or get access to influencers and their valuable ad draws. In my opinion, these are Verizon, Amazon, and Yandex. I've posted about this before, here [2][3].
[1] (2015) http://www.dmnews.com/digital-marketing/facebook-twitter-to-...
Twitter should be making the experience valuable with as least work as possible from its users.
I think you are spot on on this Verizon, Amazon, Newscorp or even Sony, but why would Yandex buy it?
The primary cyrillic social network is vKontakte whose popularity in those regions is to the detriment of Facebook. Meanwhile Google is a serious threat to Yandex' search share (and therefore, ad money), so expanding beyond their home base would be a good hedge against Google.
If you look at Yandex's portfolio of services you'll notice they're missing a general-purpose social network, and their coverage looks similar to that of Yahoo, with elements of content production (like Verizon/AOL/Yahoo) sprinkled in. But unlike Yahoo which was cash-strapped and couldn't figure out how to monetize Tumblr, Yandex has cash on hand and Twitter would be an expensive, but very strategic purchase.
Yes that's what I meant. Thanks, it's helpful, "care" is a bit ambiguous indeed, sorry :)