A defiantly nerdy take on Twitter. I appreciate it for what it is, but I don't agree. Twitter and its constraints aren't silly.<p>An arbitrary and mostly-irrelevant technical limitation is responsible for the 140 character limit. But, it turns out that limit or no, 140 character messages have utility. Forced summarization means that you can benefit from updates from hundreds of people simultaneously.<p>Compare Twitter to the Facebook feed (I follow a comparable number of people on both). In neither case can I reasonably consume 100% of the stream. That's OK. But: I am objectively capable of benefiting from a far larger percentage of the Twitter stream than I am of the Facebook stream. I go two or three pages down Facebook and I'm saturated. I could never in a million years pay attention to it all day; I dip into it maybe 2-3 times a week.<p>The fact that Twitter sort-of works for this broadcast-y use case means that is sane to build things on it, like news services, or conference CFPs, or recruitments for open-enrollment classes, or announcements for new blog posts.<p>There are clearly things Twitter has wrong, and hashtags and inband metadata are clearly at the top of the list. But that doesn't make Twitter silly. The Twitter team apparently didn't know Twitter was going to work this well when they started it. It isn't some crazy scheme to trick the linkerati. They're still catching up to what they unleashed and I'm inclined to cut them some slack.
In the comments of one of the links there, someone suggests adding Circles to the post, even if it's already public, as a way to simulate hashtags.<p>I like that, but the problem is that nobody else can see what circles you published to. (Which is probably how it should be, so they can't figure out how you've organized people. It's a privacy concern.)
I look forward to seeing how G+ solves this, it's my core issue right now that I'm getting barraged with photos from people I don't know well. I'm not really into seeing random photos of food, whatever, but I like what they have to say when they actually post text. I also see G+ being like Twitter in that you can engage with the community on core topics rather than having to know who to follow. I'm sure I'm missing out right now on great conversations because I don't know who's posting them.<p>I'd also like to be able to use G+ as my blog on certain topics that some friends care about, but not enough for me to reach out to them and ask if they'd like to be in my 'postings about this topic' circle.
The 140 character limit is actually a nice feature. It's like reading a stream of headlines rather than parsing articles and animated gifs. G+'s circles are kind of a pain to manage and post to. In addition, they ruin the serendipity that you find in your twitter stream. For example, discovering that a programmer acquaintance also enjoys running or one of your favorite bands.<p>I'm not saying that G+ is going to fail, but it doesn't make twitter archaic or obsolete.
140 is a feature, not a bug. But anyway, hashtags have nothing to do with the character limit, and everything to do with search and conversation. They make it easy to find people all talking about the same subject, with no group setup or other configuration beforehand.<p>I know a lot of nerds hate Twitter because they think it's "for the cool kids" or whatever, but this is silly.