Friday, September 25, 2009
Fluttering Away
The video "Flutter: The New Twitter" depicts, from their view, how ridiculous Twitter is. Their product, Flutter, has a maximum 'flap' of 26 characters, while Twitter has 140 characters. However, their claim is that since Twitters max length is already short, why not make Flutters length shorter? It assumes that people actually want to make their messages shorter, even though 26 characters in actuality is too short to be feasible. They want to create 'the next big thing', probably in a means to get rich, but fail to think through it. They assume people don't have enough time to write 140 characters or reach 140 characters, so they reduce it to 26 characters because they feel like it will save time. However, even if someone is busy and wants to tweet something, they are free to not use all 140 characters of Twitter. They feel limiting their character count to 26 will allow people to post faster, which in actuality, will be the same amount of time if someone was using Twitter.
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I agree that the 26 character posts would not necessarily be more efficient than 140 characters. People would likely post more 26 character flaps in the time they saved from the 140 character tweet, meaning users are just as bombarded with constant microblogs. This seems to trivialize even more the significance of each post, as well, because the quality and value of each individual post decreases with the sheer quantity of posts made.
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