It’s been over a week since my previous post on my Twitter experiences.  In the meantime I’ve only been using it sporadically (so much for being addictive).  Time flies and I’ve almost reached the end of the two-week period that I had assigned to this little experiment.

Ask a rhetorical question on Twitter and somebody will answer it within a couple of minutes.  What surprised me when I pondered the usefulness of OSGi is that the person who responded was not one of my followers but somebody who I had not interacted with before.  This highlighted an aspect of Twitter that I had not previously paid much attention to.  As well as following individuals, you can track particular search terms.  So anybody monitoring Twitter for discussions about OSGi would have been alerted by my tweet.

This is particularly interesting to me because my number one complaint about Twitter has been the utter pointlessness of most of the content (including that which I have been contributing).  Focusing on this aspect, you don’t have to follow anybody.  You could use Twitter in a similar way to Google Alerts, surfing the zeitgeist ready to pounce on any discussions that include your favoured keywords.  This way you participate only in on-topic conversations and avoid the what-I-just-ate messages.  Unfortunately, there’s still no quality control.  No Digg, Reddit or DZone equivalent to promote the good content and ignore the bad.

On a related note, you can get an overview of what topics are presently occupying the thoughts of the planet’s bored masses via TwitScoop, which provides a real-time word cloud and top 10 topics.

140 characters should be enough for anybody. Really?

One thing that I’ve held back until this penultimate post is something that I knew would irritate me right from the start: the 140 character limit.  I don’t care what anybody says, it’s not enough.  I understand the benefit of having a limit; it forces people to keep their entries concise.  However, 140 characters is too restrictive.  Sometimes not even enough for a fully-formed sentence.  Twitter doesn’t need to be restricted by SMS limits.  The future of Twitter does not lie with SMS.  Everybody who is using it from a mobile phone has Internet access.  A limit of 250 or 300 characters would be altogether more civilised.

Tweeted URLs: A regression in web usability

When you start adding links to your tweets it leaves less room to provide context.  The URLs are necessarily shrunk and obfuscated to save room, making each link a leap into the unknown.  It would be very nice to be able to attach the link to particular words in the message (you know, like we’ve been doing since 1992).  Twitter takes you back to the days before hypertext.