Thank you for summarizing that. As others have commented, I wish Snowden would simply blog about this sort of thing. Twitter is frustrating to digest for any insightful commentary that is on the longer side.
if we're lucky, twitter will do what they did with the hashtag and other things when they realised their users needs were 'inventing' new features.
The 1/n 2/n n/n tweets is a huge indicator of a feature need. Of course, that's going to dilute their original value proposition of short direct messages.
Let's be serious. No one reads twitter over sms anymore. This isn't at all the reason twitter continues to limit to 140 characters.
(Before some smartass replies "I do read over sms", well even without sms merging, twitter could still split a tweet into multiple sms. 99.9999% of their userbase wouldn't care.)
That's not relevant to the OPs point. The point is that even SMS clients were capable of merging multiple messages together, yet Twitter has still failed to do so. So whether or not they were SMS doesn't matter.
edit: well, not everyone knows what an Oh By Code is yet, so for now I suppose the link format is best, but eventually, just the code itself will suffice ...
I agree, but twitter does simplify the spread of certain "quotes". I doubt the same amount of people would take to social media to share a blog entry as opposed to tweets.
If HN and Reddit are any indication, if you post a link to a blog post, people will respond without reading it. People don't like switching domains, especially if they are browsing from an app. (Myself included)
Sure but that's not just being lazy, its also a learned habit. There's a great deal of blog posts (like most writing in general) that is 5% information and 95% fluff. Sometimes you want the art, sometimes (esp. the engineering mindset) you just want the information. Skipping to comments frequently yields this, often with bonus comments like "I'm an actual expert and that post is very innaccurate".
This. I frequently find myself skimming over HN comments on a submission before reading the article, because it provides a hint at whether reading the submission is actually worth my time.
In my experience, twitter is one of the worst offenders here, with an exorbitant amount of HTML, Javascript and pop-ups just to prevent me from reading 140 characters.
Ironically, I find Facebook's webpage way better on mobile than their actual app. I believe their app may originally have been designed for cellphone battery endurance testing. After a bit of hacking, someone figured out it could access Facebook and they decided to release it as an app.
True, but there are ways you can do something similar on a blog. If you link to the blog post from Twitter, I think that becomes a simple confirmation that the person wrote it.
Or, given this is Snowden, he could GPG sign his blog posts and post his fingerprint to Twitter or something to verify identity.
Given the way that people like to pull quotes out of context, writing something as a series of tweets forces you to look at each piece and see if it can stand alone.
