TNW Social Media. Part of The Next Web Network.

Must-have features for Twitter-killing

By Dave Winer
February 9, 2010
• Tweet This
• Tip Techmeme
• Submit to Hackernews


Share


Short URL & Title:
Comments

mardigras Must have features for Twitter killingIn October 2009, after 2.5 years of using Twitter every day, I wrote a piece that explained the limits of Twitter that we’ll have to look past Twitter to see solved, because Twitter doesn’t seem to be trying to solve them.

Tomorrow, we hear, Google will announce a product that aims to take on Twitter. If so, here’s a list of features to look for. Any of these features would give Google a serious edge over Twitter. Maybe they thought of some things I don’t have on my list. It’s always nice to put your stake in the ground. I did it with the iPad with some hilarious results.

So here’s the list of must-have features:

1. Reliability. Twitter still has trouble dealing with high-flow events like last night’s SuperBowl. Lots of Fail Whales. So if Google is able to offer reliability, no matter how much of an advantage Twitter’s installed base is, it won’t matter. When Twitter goes down everyone will reassemble on Glitter.

2. Enclosures. Can you imagine if you couldn’t enclose a picture or an MP3 with an email message? Why do we jump through so many hoops just to tweet a picture?

3. Open architecture metadata. Let developers throw any data onto a status message, giving it a name and a type, and let everyone else sort it out. It would result in an explosion of creativity.

4. Relationships with hardware vendors. I still want a one-click Twitter camera. If I can’t have it from Twitter, I’ll take it from Google.

5. No 140-character limit. I debated this one with myself. At first I compromised and said okay let’s have a 250-character limit, or a 500-character limit. But I really don’t want a limit. If I want to write short status messages, no problemmo. We’ve already made the cultural transition. We know how to do it. But sometimes a thought just can’t be expressed in 140 characters. No one is wise enough to know what the limit is, so let’s just not have one.

6. No URL-shorteners. I’ve explained this so many times. They’re stupid and ugly and they hurt the web. I like it when developers take the time to craft their URLs so they make sense to users. That’s all the shortening we really need and all we should have.

Those are some of my wish-list items. It seems likely Google will offer #1 and #2. Very unlikely they’ll do #3 (they don’t trust developers any more than Apple does). Probably not #4, though it would be easy to get some people from Kodak and Sony to come on stage with them. #5 would take a teeny bit of guts. It’s a perfect way to throw some serious confusion at Twitter. I’d recommend going all the way, but if they can’t go to 500-characters. Get some editors and authors on stage to say how nice it would be. Because they’re making a commitment to their own URL-shortener it seems unlikely they would outlaw them on their status network, but one can hope.

oreo cakesters 300x244 Must have features for Twitter killingI usually don’t subscribe to the idea that new products aimed at the user base of an established product are “killers” — but it’s been a long time since we’ve seen a product as ripe for killing as Twitter. (Lotus 1-2-3 was probably the last great example.)

The hubris of Twitter is the assumption that the product is unassailable because of the features they leave out. Sooner or later one of their competitors is going to test that theory, and I’m pretty sure it’ll prove incorrect. And where they include horrendous features that a competitor might leave out (I’m thinking of URL-shortening) they don’t seem to feel any pressure to take it out. Yet almost every user would enjoy a Twitter with real full URLs that didn’t take up any of the 140-character space. Hard to imagine anyone objecting.

OTOH, Google is a big clunky Microsoft-like company with strategy taxes, and they don’t trust the web or developers, or each other, and their internal politics drive most of the decisions they make. To compete with Twitter is an easy sell inside Google, but to actually have the will to be cut-throat about it, that’s another thing. It’ll probably have to pay homage to Google Wave (remember that?) and therefore will have some elements that are completely incomprehensible. Twitter likely won’t get killed, because Google’s product will likely fall far-short of what’s needed to get us all to think they can be trusted.

The usual disclaimers apply. This is all tea-leave-reading, I have no actual information, and I’m usually way wrong with these prognostications, but it’s still good to share the thought process.

Dave Winer
Dave Winer, 54, pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies.

  • Twitter's 140 character limit is a powerful example of how a creative constraint opened up a new world of communication, relationship development/access and content curation. I wouldn't underestimate the power of this constraint, although I agree that removing the characters taken up by a URL is smart to consider.

    Regardless, time is precious and a "status update" (Twitter is much more than that but that's another topic) needs a constraint to keep things friction free. You have access to people and conversations on Twitter because of this-open things up to long 'updates' and it will not supplant Twitter, it will simply become something else useful in another way to another, and in some instances, overlapping group of users.
  • Re: 2. Enclosures. Can you imagine if you couldn’t enclose a picture or an MP3 with an email message? Why do we jump through so many hoops just to tweet a picture?

    You're thinking very website-based, I guess. As soon as you leave Twitter you lose the hoops. I find it's quicker (and instant broader access) to tweet a picture from a mobile app than to email one. Seeing as your #4 is the instant twitpic (which I would LOVE to have btw), I think you have a lower patience threshold than me.

    I also second the other comments rejecting your expanding the word count. You want more - use a different type of service, not Twitter (or its killer). 140 is SMS-friendly; 140 trains your mind towards keener prose - Twitter is Hemingway to Blogging's Proust.
  • James Thomson
    Sounds like you are reinventing email.
  • I am releasing a service named Wirah that will implement most of the items you listed above.

    Twitter won't change though - their internal structure is appalling but making a change would be an enormous task. They seem more interested in launching stupid features like hovercards.

    It's going to be an interesting year
  • jacopogio
    the 140 car. is essential for of any Twitter-like service: if you can not interest me in a short sentence, I see no use to read more ! I agree on all the rest ;-)
  • Gonna have to disagree with you on the limit. There has to be a character limit, even if it results in having your message broken into two updates. That's the whole definition of micro-blogging. If you want more, you go to Tumblr or Posterous. If you want more than that, set up a blog and then micro-blog links / titles to your bigger posts. That's how it works. To remove the limit would be to invite disaster. Updates would be so damn long in your stream that it would make it hard to sort through it all, and you'd wind up needing a "title only" feature like in Google Reader.

    I'm also going to say you've fallen off the rocker and bumped your head when it comes to not wanting URL shorteners. For some sites, there's no way for them to reduce the size of their URLs. It's just the way they're set up. Also, URLs play a part in catching the attention of search engines. So, a short URL really isn't beneficial when trying to gain pagerank for a post. Shorteners help out because they all point to that post and they're easy to spread around to various social sites. They're just a LOT more pretty to look at. I'd much rather see a goo.gl / XXXXX link or a bit.ly / XXXX link than something that's 4 sentences long.

    Mostly, it sounds like you just made a summary of Google Wave's features. Good job imagining something that already exists.
  • 140-character limit links in with text messaging and keeps it as a 'tweet', rather than a ramble, as has been pointed out. I alos don't buy the idea of getting rid of URL-shorteners, as long URLs are often ugly and difficult to interpret. Having URLs (and usernames as well) outside the character count would be good tho.
  • I don't agree with #5 and #6. Twitter became popular also because you are forced to express yourself in a limited amount of characters. This helps to be coincise and I'm more likely to read more. IMHO, of course.
  • Great Post.140 chars limit makes Twitter Unique. Also its easier to visit the links ( for some its ugly)
  • Pownce. That is all.
  • Pownce was from Kevin Rose. #fail
  • Nevertheless, it had every feature on that list. It failed because
    friends didn't make the jump. It doesn't matter how great something
    is. If your friends/those you follow don't come, it won't catch.
  • I don't know, Dave. I think #5 is a bit of a pandora's box. The lack of a limit makes a platform just like anything else...this blog post for instance. The alternative is an arbitrary limit. 140 seems useful in that it's rooted in SMS, and we're becoming more mobile.

    To me it's not that I don't find the limits restricting (although that's VERY rare), it's that I want all of us restricted together, because it forces clarity.

    Has anyone pondered that Google is trying to connect us to GWave? I think the leap from a world in which many users spend time in GMail and out on Twitter to an environment like Wave was daunting...early adopters couldn't find a lot of value, even with larger networks to try it out with. Chris Brogan wrote a piece to offer suggestions on how to use it, but there doesn't seem to be a universal This Is What It's For feeling in the community.

    Taking the 'real time' messaging into the email environment brings that place closer to Wave. Wave doesn't warrant a trip to another web environment for me, especially within the browser. Some of the elements there, within an environment I'm already using heavily, is more compelling.
  • I believe the reason as to why the 140 character limit is in place is so that people can even SMS their tweets. It opens up the ability to tweet in countries such as India or China where WiFi isn't freely available. This should change over the time but definetely not any time soon.
  • I think 140 chars limit is the best feature on twitter. I wouldn't bother read longer tweets and 140 chars fits well on a mobile phones.

    The only problem with it is that when you have to RT three people with a bit.ly link and another #hashtag, there's almost no space for 140 characters. Twitter should separate these extras as an exception.
  • Or you could just use Twitter's official RT function. That does exactly what you want. It preserves the message in its original form and lists who's retweeted it.
  • Twitter needs to use meta data faster. Enclosures would seem a good solution to this, and appending RT'ed persons to the message to avoid using character real estate *might* work here.

    I agree though...the limit is valuable. Twitter didn't make it; our SMS systems informed their decision. I think it's a pretty efficient way to communicate, and wouldn't be all that interested in 500 word limits or something of the sort. There's plenty of places for longer discourse/conversation.
  • Does frienfeed have a character limit? Does friendfeed require URL shorteners? Does friend feed allow Does friendfeed have "enclosures"? YES! Does it have as large a user base as twitter? NO!

    I use both.
  • I also use Friendfeed & Twitter quite heavily but for very very different things. I don't think it is fair to compare them as they really are apples/oranges. For example I wouldn't expect to start a discussion (50+ comments back-and-forth) on twitter where as the Friendfeed platform lends itself quite nicely to things like that. Twitter for me is the ultimate pulse on what is going on in the world. I have lists for local happenings, tech news, etc -- it is this type of quick, instant access to information that I don't think Friendfeed or other blogging/sharing services can compete with. Beyond just the platform, it is Twitter's *huge* user base that makes it such a great tool.
  • It's not a conversation if I have to listen to you prattle on for 500 characters. If you can not say what you have to say in 140 characters then go write a blog post - like this one.

    What I think you are really complaining about is that the 140 character makes it difficult for you (and Oprah and so forth) to broadcast.
  • Let's not forget the Appsphere: Twitter's success is also thanks to all the hundreds of applications that use its APIs, and Google is not famous for leaving third parties work on its creations. That's why Latitude stands there while newcomers like Foursquare keep growing!
  • I agree with a number of points made in this article, primarily the notion that "Glitter" will offer a far higher rate of stability in addition to attachments/enclosures. In terms of the character limit and omission of URL shortening, I think that *a* character limit for "micro blogging" *is* appropriate and if these messages are being pushed to phones via SMS I think that 140 (sadly) still needs to be that limit. An unfortunate bi-product of that (or any relatively small) limit is a need for shortening URLs. I like and promote the idea of developing sites w/ "self-documenting" URLs but I think that people will need a long time to adapt to that since shortening services have become *so* prominent. As usual Dave, great post.
  • A good compromise would be URLs being exempt from that limit. All phones since the mid nineties have supported multi-part SMS, so that technical limitation isn't really.

    For the record I completely disagree with everything in this article save for stability and attachments (enclosures??). One click Twitter camera? That is your iPhone. Or any phone with a camera. No limit status messages? Tumblr. Posterous.

    Feauturitis causes bloat and usability problems. Why do you think Apple and Twitter are so succesful? Because they know which tradeoffs to make for a successful product.
  • I don't like Google taking on other companies like this, however I predict it'll be a feature in google wave to watch other waves without having them added to your list.
  • I like having the character limit. Chinese sites have the same character limit which allows users to post 2-3 times more information and I don't want to read a whole paragraph of text. The limit makes everyone...well...Tweet rather than Yadda Yadda Yadda...
blog comments powered by Disqus