Means that someone can read as usual, or delve for the full series of tweets. They could provide an indication to the writer of what percentage of people read to which depth, for example.

It could work well for presenting news articles (sentence or paragraph at a time), photo galleries/essays, slidedecks, stories, advertising, etc. Using a news article as an example, some people will be interested in just the headline, others in the first three bits, a few in the full story to its end.

- Twitter character limit is already exceeded by people writing somewhere and posting the screenshotted image of the text, which is awful.

- 1/N.. N/N style can be expressed better by extended character limits, but that will decrease the number of tweets, which a public company may see as a deteriorating metric.

Unfortunately Twitter has more usability problems than char limit in the main timeline user interface.

- Viewing a conversation is pretty much confusing. You click on a tweet, it expands and it's not obvious how the conversation with a tree-branching structure proceeds

- "Read later" is needed independent of "Like"

Vivek Wadhwa, on the other hand... his rants were a mess.

So Twitter wants to be RSS with better discovery. If there were discovery and UX for blogs like there is for podcasts (Pocketcasts, Overcast, etc.), then Twitter wouldn't even have a leg up on RSS at all.

I've often dreamed of a decentralized "Twitter" that allows you to subscribe to any Twitter, Facebook, or blogging feed and makes them all equal, first-class citizens (including the ability to reply/retweet/etc.)

* Not to mention, even if folks knew what RSS was, they don't necessarily want to host their own blog.

The application can obfuscate the underlying technology. You don't need to know what RSS is to use it every day and love it, just as you don't need to know about DNS, TCP/IP, or most other internet technologies to enjoy the web.

I'm still not sure what your point is - you said Twitter is trying to "be" RSS, but that's just the format, not the application. Twitter is not trying to aggregate content from elsewhere, either.

Maybe not directly, but they sure make it easy for third party sites to have "Share this article via Twitter" buttons.

Twitter can track you across third-party sites using its widgets, and it also knows your subscribing/reading behavior.

A decentralized system could be self-hosted and only pull in data through RSS, keeping you as anonymous as the IP address that you use. You'd only give up anonymity by replying to posts.

aka FriendFeed/Google Buzz. Neither of which were at all successful or exist anymore.

The problem is that there is no incentive to use them as platforms. People just output their other primary sources through them, and then engage on their primary platform.

That makes them horrible for users (who write comments and never hear back).

I totally disagree. I still find it impossible to follow threads of conversation on Twitter. I'm a software developer and don't consider myself to be an idiot, either.

(Unrelated: I accidentally downvoted you when I was trying to copy-and-paste, and I'm terribly sorry!)

This is already what the bulk of tweets are today. What Twitter (and Facebook) want is for people to not have to leave to read external content.

I do think there is a tendency for social media sites to converge towards the same thing. As features are added, and limitations are removed, the lines between different types of sites begins to blur. Something that started as some simple niche site, starts allowing users to host content, create forums, have their own chat app, adds features from discussion sites, etc. Eventually we will end up with some kind of hyper-FaceTubeRedditumblrkype.

If people want to use twitter in that way than it's not the right place for them, there are already similar platform out there. Twitter's core and unique feature is micro blogging platform and i think it's never loose that unique feature.

Trust me, from many, many discussions with people at Twitter, they absolutely do not see themselves as a micro-blogging platform, and do not enjoy the comparison.

I honestly see this more of a fix. All these horrible ways of using Twitter which are already commonplace will no longer be necessary. I don’t think it will fundamentally change how Twitter is used. People already use it in that way.

140c is great for one-liners and linkbait, which is - apparently - the main reason people read Twitter.

If it turns into a micro-blogging stream of extended self-expression, I think a lot of people won't have time for that.

Tumblr?

I was initially really against this, but parent comment brings a compelling argument: people are already using the service to say more than 140chars worth of stuff. The current methods to do it result in a far worse user experience than the tried and true "Read More" button would.

That said, I'm skeptical of it just in terms of product definition. Like Instagram adding portrait/landscape photos, more than 140 characters to a tweet does nothing but obscure what exactly the product is and how you're supposed to use it (even if people circumvent that anyhow).

UX is something many businesses seem to really struggle with. If unnecessary friction is added, it really should cause stakeholders and designers to pause. The "read more" CTA will lead to more truncated tweets within the first 140 chars, something that is visually unappealing and breaks the reading experience by forcing a manual action. The workarounds you describe are not used by everyone and I'd wager that most users simply keep their posts within the 140 char limit rather than pict-tweet or storm a longer convo. Yes it forces brevity, but that is the Twitter identity which supports the product's skimmability usefulness. Give users a read more option, and many will post a few extra chars just because they don't have to put much thought into their wording now. Short term: usage goes up. Long term: quality decreases as Twitter becomes just another Facebook or Medium. It will be worse than Medium though because the audience Twitter is going after is more generic.

I've always argued that Twitter's userbase is more influential and valuable because of its forced brevity and fact that it was unique.

I already avoid truncated tweets and want to read long-form content elsewhere. So, I won't be using Twitter more. Maybe others will, but again, I'd wager that Twitter is simply sliding down a path that will be ultimately more harmful for its long term sustainability.

To be honest, I find the limit of 140 characters as its best feature because it is something that forces me to distill my thoughts in as less words as possible. A kind of exercise.