1. It asks the wrong question
2. It was designed around limitations of cell phone text messaging

The Wrong Question

Twitter’s prompt is not something general like “What’s on your mind?” It’s “What are you doing?” That encourages people to post things like “I’m eating lunch” or “Just got into work,” or “Posting on Twitter.” Presumably what they mean is “What are you doing that you think people would find interesting?” but of course that’s too long a prompt from a usability standpoint.

The thing is, there’s no reason to broadcast the mundane to the world. Don’t tell me “I’m eating soup.” Tell me, “Just learned that gazpacho soup is best served cold. I wonder if they eat it in space?”

Unfortunately, that means the signal-to-noise ratio can get pretty bad at times.

Outgrowing its Limitations

Twitter posts are limited to 140 characters of plain text so that the your name and comments can fit in a standard SMS message. Now, this is great if you use Twitter via text messages on your mobile phone. It’s not so great if you use Twitter on the web, or through a smartphone app like Twitterific on iPhone or Twidroid on Android, or through any of the zillions of desktop apps.

I don’t have a problem with the 140-character limit itself (it can actually be liberating in a way), though it would be nice to have some formatting options beyond all-caps and *asterisk bolding*.

The real problem is that links have to share that limit. URL-shortening services have exploded lately as people try to squeeze links into the tiniest space possible to save room for their precious text. Even if you use something as short as is.gd, just including one link means you’re down to 122 characters.

Plus URL shorteners come with a host of problems, in particular the fact that they hide the destination. That’s no big deal if the target matches the description, or if it’s a harmless prank like a Rick Roll, but it’s all too easy to disguise something malicious.

Seriously, if you got an email that said something like this:

Look at this! http://example.com/asdjh

Would you click on that link? Even if it appeared to be from someone you know? That’s just asking to get your computer infected by a virus, trojan horse or other piece of malware. Or to see something you wish you could unsee.

Better Link Sharing: Facebook

I hesitate to bring up Facebook as a good example of anything, and I know the current layout is largely reviled by its users, but they really got posting links right.

When you want to post a link to your Facebook profile, you paste in the full URL. Facebook reads the page and extracts the title, a short summary, and possible thumbnail images. Then you have the normal amount of space to write your comment.

The one thing I don’t like about it is that it opens the link in a frame with a Facebook “toolbar” at the top, but aside from that, it’s much cleaner and more informative. I mean, compare this:

to this:

In the Facebook example, it pulled in enough information that I didn’t even need to add a comment. The link itself consists of meaningful words, there’s an indication of where it goes (googleblog.blogspot.com), an excerpt…and then of course there’s the image.

In the Twitter example, I made an effort to come up with a description (many people don’t bother), and then the link itself is just gibberish.

I’d like to see at least some of this capability in Twitter.

Maybe make links a separate field, so that the message itself doesn’t have to share those precious 140 characters, and have some sort of fallback for SMS users and older applications.

Or maybe just offer enhanced display on the Twitter website and on newer apps. Automatically follow the links (up to a certain number of redirects), extract a title (if there is one) and display something a little more legible than http://is.gd/rOoi

Come to think of it, that second option could be implemented in any Twitter client, or in a Greasemonkey script, without making any changes to Twitter itself. Hmm…

The way social networking sites use the term “Friend” has always bugged me. The actual software for Facebook, MySpace, or LiveJournal seems to use it to mean two distinct things:

• An actual friend, someone with whom you interact on a personal basis.
• An entity whose posts you’re following because you’re interested in the content, rather than invested in the person.

Wishful thinking aside, reading Neil Gaiman’s blog regularly doesn’t make me his friend.

Okay, so “Friend” is shorthand, but it brings in a load of connotations, blending the two meanings. People will freak out when a stranger “friends” them, will feel insulted if someone that they’ve friended doesn’t friend them back, or will feel rejected if someone de-friends them. I’ve heard it suggested that one reason people move from one social network to another is to start over with a clean slate of friends, and not have to worry about the drama of removing anyone from their current friends’ list.

Twitter, with the simple and direct term, “Follower,”, doesn’t seem like it would bring in the same level of baggage. To me, clicking “Follow” doesn’t feel like it has the same emotional weight as marking someone as a friend. I follow accounts that I find interesting, and that I actually have a chance of keeping up with. If someone follows me, I don’t feel obligated to follow them, and if I follow someone else, I don’t expect them to follow me.

So I was perplexed when I started seeing new followers showing up on my personal Twitter account who clearly had only done a keyword search on my latest tweet, or looked at who I was following. What were they expecting? That I would look at the “XYZ is following you!” email and trace it to their website? That I would follow them back?

It didn’t make any sense to me.

Of course, now I’m sure they were expecting me to follow them back. As this article suggests, a lot of people do see “Follow” as a synonym for “Friend”, and they were most likely trying to game that system.

In other words, despite the terminology, Twitter’s stuck with the same old baggage that clogs up other social networks.

1. There are many ways to use it.

Twitter asks the question, “What are you doing?” Some people answer that, and post things like, “eating dinner.” Some people ignore it and post other thoughts. Among the uses I’ve seen:

• Running commentary throughout the day.
• Random thoughts.
• Announcements, particularly bloggers announcing new posts, or news sites announcing new articles.
• Hey, look at this link I found. (The classic linkblogging post.)
• Conversations with other users.
• Even a story told one line at a time.

It can replace a blog, or complement it.  Mine started out just as another feed for updates, but I quickly realized I could post small stuff on Twitter and save the blog for the long posts like this one.

I’ve seen some people who post 20 times a day, and others who post once or twice a month.

2. Writing short posts can be liberating.

You don’t need to think of a catchy title. You don’t need to worry about structure. You don’t need to worry about fully developing an idea. And the rapid-fire nature of the site gives you a sense that you’re only worrying about now. No one expects you to be profound. All you have to do is jot down your thought and fire it off.

3. Writing short posts can be frustrating.

One of my high school teachers used to quote this adage: “If I had had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.” It’s easy to ramble. It’s hard to edit. And it’s really easy to run into that 140-character limit, especially if you’re including a link (even if you use a URL shortening service like tr.im).

Sometimes I think what I want to say is short enough to fit, but I find myself spending several minutes trying to rephrase it, use shorter words, cut out unnecessary phrases, and, if I have to, abbreviate words just to cram it into that tiny space.

On the plus side, the result is usually very concise.

4. You can link it to other services, but expect some awkwardness.

You can link a Twitter account to your Facebook status easily using the Twitter app for Facebook. You can link it to a self-hosted WordPress blog with Twitter Tools. You can link it to LiveJournal and other blogs using LoudTwitter. You can connect it to other micro-blogging services like pownce, identi.ca, etc. Or you can just send everything through ping.fm.

But all these sites present your message differently.

Take Facebook, for instance.  Your Facebook status is presented as a full sentence starting with your name. It even pre-fills the word “is” at the beginning of your status, though you can remove it if you want to.  So this blog entry will generate “Kelson New Blog Post: 5 Things I’ve Learned About Twitter” among a sea of “Alice is drinking coffee,” “Bob just got back from Peru,” etc.  Plus there’s the fact that Facebook has a mechanism for sharing links, which presents them cleanly as a title and excerpt, so putting that TinyURL in your status just looks weird.

5. Think outside the website. It’s all about the clients.

Sure, the Twitter website is a nice central place to manage your account and catch up on what you’ve missed if you’ve been away…but Twitter becomes much more useful when you can get instant notification of new tweets no matter what you’re doing.  That means desktop widgets, mobile clients, and SMS.

On the desktop, I can run Twhirl, Gwibber, or any number of other clients, and get an unobtrusive notification of new posts.  I can read them or ignore them without interrupting anything else I’m doing.

As for mobile devices, I’ve wanted to be able to blog from my phone for a long time.  On my old RAZR, between limited web and the standard phone keys, that was a serious pain.  Enter Twitter: All you have to do is be able to send an SMS text message.  And for something that short, even phonespeak isn’t so bad.

Even with the G1, with its full keyboard and web access, it’s easier to just run Twidroid than to mess around with the Twitter website or with full-on blogging. (Plus the ability to instantly tweet a photo is very nice, though I’ve only used it once so far.)

You can follow me on Twitter at KelsonV or SpeedForceOrg.

Because I need yet another site to suck up all my time.

It’s being described as MySpace for comics people—creators, fans, reviewers, etc.—though the feature set is pretty sparse right now. I’ve resisted MySpace itself partly because of a somewhat adversarial relationship with the site*, partly because I can’t stand looking at most MySpace pages, and partly because my friends are all on LiveJournal, so there’s really no compelling reason for me to go there.

And yet I’ve got profiles at LiveJournal, Slashdot, Opera, WordPress, Spread Firefox… Even eBay is adding blogging capabilities. Maybe I should bite the bullet and sign up for a Blogger account too. At least then I’ll be able to comment on Crimson Lightning.

*The culture at MySpace seems to encourage hotlinking images without asking. I’m still a writer at heart, so I consider the commentary to be as important as the images or more… and it really annoys me when people en masse just embed the images on their own site. Though I suppose it’s not as bad as the occasional “geniuses” on other forums who will hotlink an 800×600 or bigger photograph as their avatar, even though it only displays at 80×80. Damn kids, get off my lawn!

New relationship types include kin and contact, expanding the family and friendship dimensions, and me. The primary reason to add me seems to involve linking together profiles at multiple social networking sites – Friendster, Orkut, etc., but it brings up an interesting question:

How do you handle a site run by more than one person? We’ve had XFN info on this page since sometime last year, and it’s worked, because we share mostly the same circle of friends. But we also have links to our individual websites. Should these both be marked “me?” Presumably not, since the separate sites wouldn’t represent the same person. Perhaps something to consider for XFN 1.2?