There were things like Tweet Longer, and TwitPic (before Twitter had images) and lots of other little services that built on top of Twitter.

Twitter then started doing a lot of that stuff on its own and tried to kill off the other services (3rd party clients like Falcon Pro, TwitPic, etc.)

What was once a beautiful ecosystem to support this interesting 140 character thing got gobbled back up by a company that realized it needed to monetize.

I expected them to display the first 140 characters or so then have longer content expand upon tapping into the tweet once they started introducing those cards into the tweets.

Now that is a good idea!