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Hi Dave,

Re my sarcastic tweet:

More seriously though, I think you're right on, but that really you're identifying problems with blogging, not with microblogging.

If it were just as easy to communicate with a blog post as it is with Twitter, plus you could express longer thoughts with a blog post, then there'd be no reason to complain about Twitter's character counts. Twitter would simply be a joke, an inferior product completely dominated (that is, in all dimensions) by blogging software.

But it isn't just as easy. Part of it, as many have pointed out, is the small messages -- it's easy to write and easy to read because neither takes that much commitment. But I think there are other issues too, advantages of Twitter that we wish we had with blog posts.

• Replying on Twitter is way easier and more effective than replying with a blog post. Trackbacks are confusing, full of spam and much harder to use than a single character in front of a name.
• People are harder to find at arbitrary addresses than they are with a single username after "twitter.com/". (Like @chrismessina and others, I wish this weren't the case, but currently, I believe it is.)
• It's easier to be part of a trend just by typing a # and a word than tagging your blog post and hoping technorati picks it up.
• Republishing content is a trivially easy and widely-accepted practice. (I think this is why single-click re-blogging on tumblr is so popular too and why Google Reader's "share" feature is so compelling.) You can also push content to particular people with @mentions.
• Syndication and reading is handled in the same place as writing -- as soon as you sign up for one, you've signed up for the other. Even though Twitter syndication is inferior to RSS (Twitter is a single unreliable service; there's no tracking of what's read and unread across devices), I suspect more regular people use Twitter to keep track of all their friends than use an RSS aggregator.

I think it's not so much a problem that Twitter has a character limit as it is that blogging platforms don't have all these other advantages. Conversations happen easily and naturally on Twitter, despite the severe limitation of character counts. I'd love to see those same advantages in the blogging platforms we use every day -- something you know about first hand!

Anyway, thanks for starting the conversation, and for using both Twitter and your blog to do it.

Nick

Want to know the next big thing? After Twitter and location-based services, it's going to be re-blogging.

Have you been reading your little sister's re-blog? Or her friends' re-blogs?

By allowing re-publishing and commenting with as little as a single click, Tumblr is letting people feel ownership from what is largely curation. I do it a little with delicious and Google Reader, but these girls are doing it voraciously with re-blogging of photos and quotes.

And why not? Although I think technically this is done pretty poorly (copies of things leads to all sorts of problems and I already have a lot of issues with Lynn's friends and trying to track down the original of anything, since it may be several links deep), but the basic idea is smart. Everyone should be out there curating the web, not just a couple of big-name bloggers like Kottke. Add your comments and then (once the technical challenges are solved) compare your comments to everyone else's. Start a conversation on top of the web instead of in it.

Paragraph fingerprinting (CMU) and quotation finding (Google) are some techniques to bolt this on to existing practices. That might be more pragmatic than the Xanadu-style alternative. But I think an enhanced Delicious is where it's at (URLs as actual universal resource locators) -- it's just a question of who gets there first.