How Twitter can monetize it’s fast userbase has been a hot topic as of late. Recently @mike9r suggested that maybe twitter should allow people to pay for their service if they pleased. In return Twitter could allow them to have 240 chars instead of 140. An interesting idea.
And while I do agree the idea has merit, some might argue that it destroys something key to what makes twitter twitter. And I count myself in that camp.
Part of the value in twitter is that it’s quick. I’ve been annoyed more than once that I couldn’t get my thoughts into 140 chars. However, that limitation keeps you on target, it ensures that everything is bite-sized.
Increasing the character count could make it harder to quickly scan through tweets. My personal feeling is that this would just make twitter more distracting.
The other argument I made was that this could break many twitter clients. Mike argued that this was ok, essentially this was good for the market:
@covati It would kill a bunch of clients, but then again, why would Twitter care about that? 3rd party apps would race to make a new version
I argue that these clients and other third party are a huge part of what has made Twitter so successful. All these interesting integrations and efficiency tools have actually made twitter useable.
I personally find it daunting to try to interect with close to 400 people via the web interface. Tools like TweetDeck allow me to manage that massive flood of tweets. If the people who manage these tools have to deal with an ever changing and tool or API then they may become discouraged and stop maintaining them.
That’s my take, I love twitter, it’s a great tool. If they went with Mike’s suggestion I’m sure it would be fine. But for now, I say, stay with 140.
