To me, Twitter works because many people prefer to read 100 headlines and know a little about everything, than reading just a big essay. Have a variety of views, rather than just one.

It is better for the reader, not so for the writer. Because of that, I do not understand why they focus so much on getting more writers (login) than readers (views).

That's some assumption you make with no evidence. I'd sooner assume people like reading 100 people who agree with their inner biases or views.

IMO, it's a platform for people to self promote which causes an obvious viral effect.

"follow me at _ on Twitter"

I think looking at it this way is a bit naive. While I agree that "attachments" shouldn't take up tweet text, the 140 character limit is a core component of the service. Call it a micro blog or a mass SMS, Twitter is 140 characters.

That said, I think most comments are missing the point - having attachments not take up characters really won't make the service any more useful to the mainstream... That's the real problem in my opinion.

I don't know, if you post a link as well as an image you're losing 24 characters from a 140 character limit. You lose just less than 20% of the characters available. I think a 20% increase is fairly substantial.

Especially considering most changes are pandering to brands, and this is a use case that we use a lot. (Whether Twitter is a useful channel aside...) extra space for copy will always go down well with the people paying the bills.

The more you think about Twitter the more you understand it, including why it works, and at Twitter, lots of people are thinking about Twitter, so they probably know that SMSes worked like conversation, where the tech forced you to be polite, i.e. not ramble on about something without letting the other party say anything, they should just listen. SMS conversations flows like a oilite chat about the weather. Quick, brief and with nice pauses in between. Maybe that's not what they were after but isn't that what Twitter achieved?

My experience is a lot like that. However one of the core issues Twitter has had in the recent past is that many users were not experiencing polite conversation on twitter. They were experiencing harassment instead.