For all its reported struggles with growth, Twitter still has the rare privilege of being a destination—a platform that people check frequently and repeatedly, from which they find other things. People are linking to images on Twitter? Let’s incorporate images! People are watching YouTube videos from Facebook? Let’s host videos of our own. People are reading articles from the feed? Let’s… put articles in the feed! Platforms are markets; they research themselves. It’s a great setup for the platforms! And one that Twitter has embraced enthusiastically, gradually assembling a service out of features conceived and tested by users and (mostly now defunct) third parties. (Down to its logo. Down to its verbs!)
So the capability to post longer text posts that expand inside the feed seems especially notable because posts can be counted in characters, and Twitter is known for its character count. But a feed in which you can already tap “play” or open a grid of photos into a slideshow or open a link into an internal browser is a feed in which tapping a text preview to see more text will feel natural. It won’t take long, I imagine, for links to start to feel almost out of place—for Twitter to feel a bit more like Instagram, where users frequently write blog-length captions, and where the links and the web effectively don’t exist.
In his latest on the Content Wars, John Herrman explores how 10,000-character tweets might change the way readers and journalists relate to the platform.
(Source: The Awl)
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