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What's so sacred about 140?

Wednesday, November 25, 2009 by Dave Winer.

The basic question that Twitter asks is not What are you doing? or What's happening? it's Why the frack does everything have to fit into 140-characters?  

In other words: What's so sacred about 140?  

And if it's sacred, why make an exception for geographic data or which app created the tweet or which tweet it's in response to, or that it was retweeted by 20 people and who they are? Shouldn't the architecture of tweets be open to any kind of perversion that anyone thinks of? 

Every good idea people come up with for Twitter involves latching a new piece of metadata to a tweet. And in the middle you have a conflicted, slow and arbitrary (and opaque) decision-making process, controlled by one company. 

The tools vendors are too scared of the mother ship to break out, but someone will go first, Tweetie or Tweetdeck or Brizzly. Someone small but good and ambitious with nothing to lose. They will let the tweets flow around Twitter, and at that point the question will become for the others whether they work with the new leader. I'm amazed that any of them are still willing to leave this door open for one of their competitors to walk through.  

If you make a Twitter client please, start pushing your users' updates to a RSS feed on a server outside of twitter.com. It's just a backup. That's the first easy small step down the path of free evolution. Once someone does that, there are more steps. 

To get an idea of what's possible, I recommend reading A better design for Twitter retweets. Wouldn't it be great if we didn't have to wait for Twitter Corp to try this out?