Why Twitter is Different

I started using Twitter and Facebook at almost the same time. When Google Plus became available, I signed up for that too, to give it a try. Twitter is different from the other two and it's been interesting to me to reflect on why.

Both Facebook and Google Plus encourage laziness and sloppiness. They encourage all kinds of mindless/thoughtless posts in your stream, like "Bob done Killed A Varmint!" Or a link stuck in to some other article, with an automatically generated thumbnail and teaser. Or just rambling posts carelessly written. It turns out that I really like the results of the tiny bit of additional structure that twitter enforces: when you make people actually craft a short message and hone it down to 140 characters, it's better.

I don't follow the many of the same people in Facebook and Twitter. I mostly only follow people in Twitter who take the time to craft short, interesting messages. People who post things that get truncated with a link get unfollowed pretty fast. The same with people who just post links without some informative comment. Or who only re-tweet other people's posts. Or who post too often. There's a sweet-spot there somewhere that results in a highly informative feed where I actually want to look at each one of the posts -- even if just for a moment. And the fact that they're short and complete is a critical part of that.

In Facebook, there's too much content: it's clear that I don't see a lot of what's there. And many of the posts are too long or too pointless to read carefully. And having a robot make decisions for me about what I want and don't want to see is not the solution.

I also enjoy the discipline myself to make me craft my message carefully: the 140 character limit makes a huge difference in the kinds of things I write for twitter. The necessity of choosing each word carefully helps me focus on what's important -- what I'm really trying to say.

That's not so say that everything about Facebook is bad or inferior. I enjoy the more extended side discussions you can have there. But having a feed of short and complete posts makes my experience with twitter uniquely satisfactory.

If there was one thing I could fix about twitter it would be to require real hyperlinks: let people link to stuff, but encourage people use links to the actual thing (not a URL shortening service) and to have hypertext, instead of clickable URLS. If people don't know how to write a hyperlink, have the system help them. And don't count the links toward the 140 character limit. It would have two positive effects: first, it would make the messages more concise, compelling and readable, but it would also reduce the ability of the system to be misused with links to spam sites. Being able to actually see the real URL has a lot of value, but having to stick it into the text is just stupid: solving that problem was one one of the key insights that made the World Wide Web so great.