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.
January 14th, 2009 at 1:35 am
I’ve always been in favor of a pro-version of Twitter that would allow for more functionality, but hadn’t thought about an expanded character count as one of those features. The more I think about it, the more I actually like that idea. While Twitter has been built around the idea of 140 characters, it is frustrating when you’ve got to go back and edit a few words down just to make the character cutoff.
I’ve expanded a bit more in a post on Microblink so as not to clog up your comments:
http://microblink.com/2009/01/14/would-you-pay-for-more-characters-on-twitter/
January 14th, 2009 at 3:45 am
Thanks for the comment, Mike. I’ll be sure to check out your post in the morning when my eyes work again. I’ll get the other Mike to weigh in too!
January 14th, 2009 at 10:02 am
[...] already asked, “How much would you pay for Twitter?“, Adam Covati (@covati) is stirring the pot with a specific feature suggestion brought up by @mike9r that he feels people may get excited [...]
January 14th, 2009 at 5:27 pm
Adam – you can post 240 characters today to Twitter using BigTweet – http://bigtweet.com/
It breaks a larger post into two nicely formatted sequential tweets. There is also a 140 character mode and lots of other features. Installs quickly and easily on all the major browsers.
Scott
http://twitter.com/scott_carter
January 14th, 2009 at 5:32 pm
@scott – I’m aware of big tweet, it looks like a great app, and you’re right, just the solution to this problem. I actually suggested that to Mike when we originally had this convo ;)
March 17th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
I think something gets overlooked, despite how many people may use a 3rd party application, SMS is still a big gateway for people to twitter. Considering that 160 characters is the norm for most SMS messages, with the limit of 140 it allows for a twitter update along with the username to come through in one message instead of a two part message.
Call my old school, or “last year” but I still like using SMS for my twitter updates.