Dave Winer, as always, is discussing the future of Internet on the systems internals /programmatic front. And the talk is as engaging as it could get.
In his ‘tea-reading’ cum wishlist, Dave is vouching for a number of positive changes that could be brought in to turn Twitter the service into Twitter the standard (of how we communicate in future).
In item #5, Dave is vouching against the 140 character limit of the Twitter updates and he wants the limit to go away altogether.
The 140# limit probably has its origins in the original service wanting to be the SMS equivalent of the Internet (and Dave has already called it SMS 2.0) without actually having any programmatic or capacity issues (when used on Internet). So while this could be the origins of the limit, I think it is also the very magic recipe of Twitter itself.
I hear you ask ‘how come’? When the information was limited, the average person was presumably reading a lot. Although not necessarily a very wise thing to do, but I still remember (at least) trying to go through all that was listed on the main Yahoo website in 1996 in search of making sure that I do not miss on anything online. That was crazy absurd but you can imagine the amount of time we as Internet users had at our disposal.
On came the weblog and RSS revolution [where Dave, just to give credit where it is due, played a prophetic, if not godly role] which was further fueled by Web 2.0 slipperiness creating more genuine and the not-so-genuine ‘sub-contents’ (read comments and mentions etc.) The appetite of reading the blogs went from nothing to an all time high, and then took a nose dive to the extent that Google reader lost its home page status of a lot of users. And then came Twitter.
In one sense - and this is why I wrote this entry - Twitter played the funny, often-misunderstood role of a strict, sometimes even senseless Head Master (yes, my country has a British colonial history). ‘His’ instructions are to be followed at all cost. Lo and behold, the discipline, however illogical it is, resulted in forcing everyone to express themselves in a 140# limitation. This gave back an entire new lease of life to individuals some of them had been writing longer and longer pieces only to be left out by potential readers due to scarce attention.
In my personal experience, a lot of people I know have restarted ‘creating’ contents which at some point in time they had stopped at their blogs because they are now sure that with the ugly, funny, illogical limits of the ‘Head Master’, they have far more chance of being heard - as long as they can be brief to 140#. This is a great contribution of Twitter and we need to look again before vouching for this limit to go away. The meta data, as correctly being repeatedly called for by Dave, must come in at all costs carrying URLs, hash-tags and what not. But let the limit remain. It brings back the art of brevity in communication.
I know this is a relatively long blog entry. And not a lot of people will read it. Unless I tweet about it. Within 140#!
