Re:Google Buzz
by holman on Tuesday February 09, 2010 @03:34PM
(#1113207)
Just as a nitpick: "the messages can be larger" is an anti-feature for me, and for many others that use Twitter. Inline images and videos is one thing, of course, but if longer messages was a feature then blogging would have defeated Twitter before it launched.
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Most people can't figure out RSS readers, and twitter lets you read and write in the same interface. Everything else about twitter is an anti-feature, including the post length limit.
The main reason for the 140 char limit is SMS. When it launched, Twitter was mostly a way to do a sort of SMS listserv.
I wouldn't call the 140 char limit an anti-feature either. Its become a key differentiation point, and is in many ways what makes Twitter Twitter.
You can say a lot on 140 chars, also if something's junk you know quickly to not read it. It also doesn't take a lot of screen room, thus there's a lot of data available without a scroll down.
It would be interesting to have a 140, 700, 5000, unlimited character filters in Buzz. If its display algorithm was used well, it could work out if long posts from a particular person were usually not worth reading to most people.