Comments in Twitter?

Thursday, May 08, 2008 by Dave Winer.

I just posted a Tweet: "After seeing comments blossom in FriendFeed, it seems either Twitter should have comments, or extend the API so someone else can add them." 

Why?  

1. People still reply to tweets, expecting a response in a tweet. It's noise to most of my followers. They send responses (to me) asking what am I responding to. If I answer that, then other people ask what I'm responding to in explaining the other person's response. Twitter is not symmetric, that's a good feature, but it makes for a shitty conversation medium, imho. 

2. Far more people use Twitter than use FriendFeed. Yes, I think it's great there are APIs and that makes it possible for FriendFeed to build on what Twitter does. But it is a competitive market and ideas should slosh around among all the products.  

3. The length of this post should provide a clue why comments would be good in Twitter. I started writing #1 in Twitter itself, and went over 140 chars before I had expressed a single idea.