> The following extract shows how a messaging client's text entry could be arbitrarily restricted to a fixed number of characters, thus forcing any conversation through this medium to be terse and discouraging intelligent discourse.
<label>What are you doing? <input name=status maxlength=140></label>
Exactly. That was kind of like telling a content creator to build a web site and post videos there after getting kicked off YouTube. Sure, only a fraction of their fanbase will start using their site to consume their content, but hey, at least they have a broader reach than almost anyone on Earth had 20 years ago.
Something can be a highly currated narrative and be accessible to everyone. Shit, people even have web browsers on their phones and computers these days. Social media in general, and Twitter in particular, does not encourage the creation of highly currated narratives.
We should probably invent a publish-subscribe distributed protocol for this, maybe some kind of Really Simple Syndication.
+1 for that. Was RSS just too much effort to catch on? Or was discovery the issue? It's a great thing.
Could the government have built such a system by commission for the public good (after all it was directly involved in the Internet, the substrate thereof), or is this something that was only able to coalesce with private capital, markets, and profit motive?
Actually, the problem isn't Twitter per se, is that we've found out it's easier to digest (and regurgigate, and fabricate upon) 140 characters at a time. Twitter has inadvertently found an incredible exploit and vulnerability of the human mind, and now it's out there and we're fucked, excuse the French.
Even if Twitter were to die tomorrow, my conjecture is that most of the news and media will move to some other form of short-and-easy-and-dumb social network. 140 characters is what the TV was to the radio.
The comparison with radio => TV breaks down when you realize that TV is a medium much richer in information than both 140/280-character text and radio. (Of course Twitter is not just text these days.)
But anyway, I'm much more concerned about not so much journalists themselves, but rather about those people that are still trying to have discussions on Twitter. Starting with politicians, for obvious reasons.