Twitter Pro? Please god, no

Posted on October 14, 2007 by Ian Betteridge

Dave Winer on Twitter Pro?: “

A thread was started by Scoble who suggested, in a phone talk yesterday, that he would pay $10 a month for a Twitter that didn’t have the 140 character limit.”

Please god, no. I’d unsub within five minutes from anyone on Twitter posting longer than 140 characters.

Repeat after me: Twitter Is Not Blogging. I already have perfectly good RSS feeds which allow me to read anyone’s longer ramblings, including on my mobile phone. You already have the ability to use Twitter to send out a link to a longer post. If you cannot learn the value of brevity, then really, you’re not likely to have anything to say to me that’s so important it needs to pop up on my mobile.

(Note to others: This applies equally to people who split long posts over multiple Twitters. There is nothing you have to say to me that’s so important that I have to be interrupted by three SMS messages for it.)

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  • http://husk.org/ Paul Mison

    Whisper it, but Twitter doesn’t have a 140 character limit: only the web interface does. It’s possible to send more via SMS, and via the API (a friend remarked that you notice people switching to Twitterific). Similarly, as you noticed, Twitter will happily split long messages across multiple SMSes (well, it does for direct messages anyway).

    So all Scoble needs to do is knock up his own web front end, or use a different client.

    Now, paying $10 a month not to get those asinine tips appended to short SMSes? That might be worth it.

  • http://phaidon.philo.at/martin/ martin l.

    why do you do twitter-on-SMS anyway? using Opera Mini and the twitter mobile URL is much more convenient, IMHO. and one can use the SMS only for Very Important Alerts from one or two contacts.

  • http://husk.org/ Paul Mison

    martin: I can’t speak for Ian, but for me, SMS is free, on my phone, and easy to use. Data is metered, I don’t have Opera Mini installed, and indeed I haven’t even set up mobile data on this phone. Frankly, I’m not away from computers enough to care about anything richer than SMS.

  • http://profile.typekey.com/ianbetteridge/ Ian Betteridge

    Paul can actually speak for me on this one :)

    Yes, the key thing is that on many contracts SMS’s are either free or bundled with absurdly high numbers, so they’re effectively free. Data rates, on the other hand, are rarely free.

    Plus, browsing is pull, not push, which makes it effectively useless for many purposes. If a friend updates his Twitter with “I’m on the south bank if anyone wants a drink”, receiving it via SMS is useful. Finding it an hour later when I log into a web site isn’t.