Is there anyone else who hates Twitter because of its 140 character limit and overall focus on broadcasting rather than sharing?
For the 140 character limit, I get the historical SMS reasons and that it helps you "focus" your content, but taking 10 minutes to squeeze a thought in that turns from something half interesting to "bc u r 4 the GPL" or whatever.
Sure MAYBE I could reword things a little denser, but a tweet should be somewhat in the moment and nothing takes me out of it like editing to some arbitrary limit.
As for the aspect of people liking smaller messages, they can do what FB does and hide behind a "Read more" link.
Overall, Twitter feels like being in a crowded bar. Lots of noise, not many conversations.
But often it encourages abusing the limitation by splitting long(er)-form content into multiple tweets.
I agree that it's so fundamental to the brand and Twitter's identity that it might cause a lot of problems if it were reverted, but frankly it's completely arbitrary. If you want to produce 140 (or less) content, you can do that without a hard limit.
People hack around it because it's such a ubiquitous platform, but people would also like to address that audience in long(er)-form. It culminates in inconvenience for both producer and consumer.
No, I agree. Twitter as a general-purpose communication platform is impractical. Yet a ton of industry figures have crowded into it for some reason. Twitter is the flashy, arbitrarily constrained version of what fingering other people's .plan files was in the 80s and 90s.
The 140 char limit turns it into a new journalistic form - almost anyway.
I have many issues with it, in addition to the sign-in page and general lack of access:
For non-celebs, the value of having tens of thousands of followers is often close to zero, so it's more vanity nano-press than useful communication channel.
For newsy events, real-time reporting is incredibly noisy and repetitive.
Retweet count isn't a good reader value marker. There should be some better way to find the best content.
Developer relationships aren't great, and unlimited access to the firehose would help create some innovation - which is badly needed at this point.
Handling multiple accounts is painful. If you want to use the same devices to tweet for a business and tweet as a person it's really not fun.
Twitter management history is uninspiring. No one seems to be in charge of thinking of cool new stuff, so Twitter is turning into formerly cool old stuff.
Overall, Twitter feels like being in a crowded bar. Lots of noise, not many conversations.
This could all just be me, though...