For the record, I think Twitter would benefit from two enhancements. The first is the ability to have private groups (group DMs). In many ways, I can see why it does not have this, I think if it did, in the early days at least, too many people would use it as their default option, they might never share their content with the world, and we would lose much of the serendipitous benefit of Twitter. If this facility were to be introduced, I’d suggest it might only come available after you’ve had a Twitter account for a year and have become accustomed to the open nature of the medium.
The second feature is long messaging. I’ve seen a lot of people complaining about the new deck.ly feature in Tweetdeck, and, I myself have, in the past, been a bit irritated with how often some people resort to using services like twitlonger. I think the problem with both these features (twitlonger when it is built into some Twitter clients) is they make it too easy to go over the character limit and not think about making your message succinct. Succinctness and being to the point is what has made Twitter a success, and we should not threaten that. However, we all need to say something that’s more than 140 characters from time to time (I’m doing it now), and, there are a lot of non-bloggers on Twitter who do not have ready access to a blog to make their point. So, we need longer messaging, but, it shouldn’t be easy to default to it. Please keep it to 140, unless it is absolutely necessary to go longer.
