The Freedom of Blogging

140 characters. What can you say that has any meaning in 140 characters? Not much, I find. I kinda like Twitter for the friendly banter it engenders with the people I have discovered online – mostly at MegaTokyo – and that I seem to be connected with them in some small way. The problem I have is the restrictions of the medium. 140 characters seems to be designed for communication through texting on a phone, so it’s limited and very limiting. If someone has more to say, I find we type to the 140, then post, then type to the next 140, then post, and so on. This morning I opened Twitter and found a friend had made six posts in a row just so he could say three sentences! I mean, I was glad to hear what he had to say, it just seemed so cumbersome.

How do people handle this limitation? For the most part, the posts I see on Twitter are just shorthand streams of consciousness; and, I’m sorry, but the state of your gastric tract or what you ate for lunch are just not that interesting. It’s as if people respond to this limitation by limiting what they dare say and rarely attempt anything too involved or thoughtful. It’s become a waste of time.

I am also on Facebook, but not very often. I usually find it more frustrating than Twitter. I don’t have that many friends or relatives on my account, but some of them post all the time, all kinds of crap – by crap I mean cute pictures or videos they want to share, or level-ups and milestones they’ve reached in all the games they play. I like the pics and videos sometimes, but I don’t really care if they offed some mythical godfather in Mafia wars! Please people, don’t post that kind of stuff. Anyway, I’ll post something on Facebook and 10 minutes later it’s off the page because all these other posts just keep the front page flowing downward – it’s like a text & video simulacrum of the Matrix screens! Perhaps I just don’t use it right. I hear of people who spend all their time on Facebook, but I don’t understand what they’re doing that is so compelling. I also find the constant advertising there most irritating. Still, I guess it fills a need.

So I like the freedom blogging gives you. I can write at length on whatever topic is on my mind. I see blogs used for information sources and repositories too. It’s a valuable tool. On the other hand, I do like the conversational quality that Twitter provides – I post a comment, and one of my followers can respond in real-time. It’s nice. Feels like we’re doing something together, and we are!

Looking at these three community streams, I think we need a compromise. I think the next big app for the web will be a Twitter on steroids. We need a Twitter-type utility that allows you to post full sentences and paragraphs, say 500 or 1000 characters. No pictures or videos displayed – that would just recreate Facebook – the method of loading URLs in Twitter with the shorthand code is a good thing. Then we could have real conversations. I guess the best solution would be to leave the Twitter layout just as it is, but with more characters available for use. Also, maybe they could set it up like AOL used to be where if you were in a conversation with someone and wanted to continue but not in the public forum, you could split off into a separate chat room. That would be a nice enhancement to Twitter.

Meanwhile, I’ll keep blogging.