Almost ten years ago, Twitter was launched, not as a social network, but an “information network”. Its name was chosen for the definition of the word, meaning “a short burst of inconsequential information”, and the site now boasts more than 332 million active users.
On March 21st 2006, at 9.50pm Pacific Standard Time, the first tweet was posted by Jack Dorsey (@Jack): “just setting up my twttr”.
Although Twitter didn’t begin with its 140 character limit, it was a feature added early on so as to fit into a 160 character text message. As the popularity of smartphones increased, the character restriction began to look rapidly out of date, so at the start of the year, Dorsey announced that there were plans to up the character limit to 10,000. Several days ago, these plans were scrapped: here’s 10,000 characters explaining why doing so was a good idea.
The website was originally called “twttr”, and was designed to work by texting a small group of people the random bouts of irrelevant information we now know as tweets. The original name was partly to play on the idea of America’s five digit SMS codes, fitting the trend of photo sharing website Flickr and partly for the reason that the domain the founders wanted, twitter.com, was owned by a bird lover. Until they were sure their new venture would be greeted with some level of success, the creators didn’t want to fork out a lot of money to purchase the URL.
Twitter’s founders describe the site’s beginnings with a candid level of honesty and modesty, happy to admit that when the project began they had no idea why people would use the website or how it would make money, merely that it was “a fun thing for family and friends when they are not in the same place”.
In fact, the addictive messaging site’s origins are remarkably humble, being the product of a “daylong brainstorming session”, where the aim was to find a way to reinvent the podcasting company Odeo as they faced competition from other big companies – Apple among them. Those set the challenge broke off into groups, and whilst eating Mexican food at the top of a slide in the north end of South Park, Dorsey came up with the idea.
In the words of Dom Sagolla (@Dom): “His idea made us stop eating and start talking.”
On Friday, Dorsey announced that the limit was there to stay, saying that “brief tweets are the best”. There are a lot of things that separate Twitter from other social networking sites – the popularisation of hashtags, the ability to speak with celebrities as easily as your friends – but the 140 character cap is what sets the site apart.
The cap has already been lifted for Twitter’s direct messages, a move that’s received a lot of support for the fact that it make a lot of sense. When you’re trying to hold an in-depth conversation, but can only ever respond with a text message’s worth of speech – and, come on, who limits their text to 160 characters nowadays? – it’s time consuming and a little embarrassing.
“Microblogging” is a term sometimes used to describe the function of the website, and what better way is there to describe the only website you can talk about every food you eat, TV show you watch (minute by minute, of course), and terrible update of said social networking website’s phone app? Twitter is designed as an endless stream of passing thoughts, not a place for lengthy, fully supported debate.
There’s a school of thought that says if you can’t fit something into a tweet, don’t tweet about it. Twitter was made for brief snippets of people’s lives, and so it should stay that way. But there have always been ways to work around the constraints, either through writing a longer message on a phone’s notes and print screening 1-4 pages of it, or using a site like Twitlonger, where you can write a longer tweet and include it in a link.
The most efficient way to go about posting over-140 character messages is to use the neat – albeit sometimes annoying – reply feature. Post your original (or “master”) tweet, and reply in a thread of messages, so only the first and last will appear in your followers’ timelines, but they can easily read all the intermediate ones. It keeps the limit, it keeps things brief, it keeps thing related, and it plays into the chain-of-thought idea that Twitter have so well worked their way into.
It’s easy to browse your way through the quick-fire information Twitter throws at you, and with it increasingly being used as a way for news channels to put out their stories, or break news in tweets, as well as people on the street tweeting news as it happens, it can be like reading all the morning papers as once, with a much quicker response rate.
Alongside BuzzFeed and all those random, weird websites that flood your laptop with viruses, Twitter has become a master of clickbait – that is, to give such a shocking headline that the reader can’t help but click on the link provided in the tweet. Whilst it doesn’t surprise me so much from sites that are filled with features such as “top ten things you didn’t realise lemon juice could solve”, it’s a bit unnerving when news sources like The Independent resort to using this. It prompts the question of what they would do if faced with the ability to include full news stories on Twitter. Would they share the whole thing, or would they still only share a headline and attempt to redirect readers to their website? Or, better still, would they have to change their website’s content to cater for things that Twitter couldn’t handle? Even longer articles, lengthy video, huge photo galleries. If full news articles, blog posts or interviews, could be posted on Twitter, and therefore shared quicker because of it, what would be the purpose of online newspapers? For the sake of these, it only seems fair, right, and proper that we keep the brief, brief, and the lengthy elsewhere, for people who have the time to read more.
Among the writer-y types on Twitter, there’s a writer’s block prevention technique of telling a story in six words, inspired by “For sale: baby shoes, never worn”, a piece of flash fiction often attributed to Ernest Hemingway. Whilst many don’t believe a story can be told in six words, or indeed 140 characters, these miniature stories are all a part of what sets Twitter apart.
If Twitter became a website where you could write full news articles, short stories of one and a half thousand words, or share academic essays in the course of three or four tweets, the site’s main purpose would no longer exist.
Of course, there are downsides to having a text message length information networking site – it can be hard to convey information fairly and accurately. When things are brief, it can be easy to misinterpret the tone of a message and miscommunication can always be at risk. Celebrities are guilty of this, choosing instead to tweet about a matter instead of putting out a full press statement and leaving the details for the public to decide.
As companies become more competitive with making their product cheaper, they are constantly looking to improve their public image and customer service. Research shows that around 70-90% of people read reviews before buying a product, and if a potential customer were to run a quick internet search which brings up a lot of negativity on Twitter, well, it doesn’t make for good business.
If you have a bad experience with, say, ASDA or Boots – two companies I’ve previously complained to via social media – and tweet about it, chances are their social networking customer help desk will be ready to help you in a matter of minutes. It’ll encourage you to shop there again, and it’ll make it transparent that they’ve got good customer service. And, of course, what better way to explain, in detail, the problems with your experience, that with a 140 character tweet? When it comes to resolving problems, longer tweets might make things a lot easier.
Increasingly, we are in a time where people thrive off consuming more information than ever before, but when we’re so constantly bombarded by it – from the news to science to technology to local developments to celebrity gossip to what’s happened in your own social circle – that we can’t physically consume and retain it all. To an extent, we have to pick and choose what we filter out. Without wanting to sound like a promotional advert for Twitter, we have to choose what we want to follow. According to a 2012 study, the average Twitter user follows 102 people, and to read every tweet that relatively small number of people posted would be time consuming and boring. Imagine if each tweet were over 71 times longer.
Twitter is for grabbing attention. Everyone gets the same amount of space, mostly free from the algorithm style of censorship that Facebook takes such pride in, to scream into the vast void that is the internet. It is not the terrifically lengthy rants or baby pictures that Facebook users seem so inclined to relentlessly share, it is a brief window into the lives of the masses, from a foolish thing your friend said at lunch to a complaint about the weather or your thoughts on the new Bond film. It’s a face of a celebrity’s’ public image, it’s how journalists share news quickly, it’s how campaign groups encourage movement nationwide. It is not a website to preach, or rant, or convert, it is how you share the information that is elsewhere on the internet.
As annoying as it can be, when you realised you have to shorten “awful” to “bad”, or put “ur” instead of “you’re”, or not use any hashtags, there’s a certain charm in these random snippets of thoughts, these pockets of information from strangers, friends, politicians, celebrities, bloggers. If Twitter were to become a site where these weren’t the main attraction, another site or app would rise up and reclaim the minute charm of the inability to rabble.
In short, if you could write a full blog post on a site designed specifically for the purpose of “microblogging”, what would be the site’s purpose?
Keep Twitter this simple.
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