Written by Rob Hudson
Posted in Social Media

I'll start out by admitting that this is a spoof video. I know. That was a spoiler comment, but I actually think that this hilarious video makes a great point.

For those of you who are not very familiar with Twitter, it's original purpose was to enable short quick updates similar to a blog, but not intended to be as lengthy, i.e. "microblogging". Users liked it because they could make quick statements about what they were doing or thinking without the pressure to write full paragraphs like this one. Twitter "tweets" are limited to 140 characters. As a result, numerous tricks were invented to stay within that space such as shortening URLs with TinyURL.com or Adjix.com and others. You can "follow" those that you find interesting and see all of their tweets (please follow me at http://twitter.com/vivosity) and you can be followed.

When I worked at AOL, I always imagined being able to start and visualize an international conversation about "Green Energy" for example where all the tweets were communicating together like a global town hall. We did not do this. My model was Twittervision, but users would actively join the topic and you would be simultaneously viewing a single topic stream. Today, you can see what tweets are being said about a particular subject by searching on a topic at Twitter.com, but it is not a unified conversation really. It's more like simultaneous, independent statements.

I'll start out by admitting that this is a spoof video. I know. That was a spoiler comment, but I actually think that this hilarious video makes a great point.

For those of you who are not very familiar with Twitter, it's original purpose was to enable short quick updates similar to a blog, but not intended to be as lengthy, i.e. "microblogging". Users liked it because they could make quick statements about what they were doing or thinking without the pressure to write full paragraphs like this one. Twitter "tweets" are limited to 140 characters. As a result, numerous tricks were invented to stay within that space such as shortening URLs with TinyURL.com or Adjix.com and others. You can "follow" those that you find interesting and see all of their tweets (please follow me at http://twitter.com/vivosity) and you can be followed.

When I worked at AOL, I always imagined being able to start and visualize an international conversation about "Green Energy" for example where all the tweets were communicating together like a global town hall. We did not do this. My model was Twittervision, but users would actively join the topic and you would be simultaneously viewing a single topic stream. Today, you can see what tweets are being said about a particular subject by searching on a topic at Twitter.com, but it is not a unified conversation really. It's more like simultaneous, independent statements.

This humorous video pushes the concept further by asking, what if we shortened the character quota down further to 26 "flaps", how might that improve efficiency? It plays into the frenetic, ADHD communication style that follows the path from written letter to email to IM to SMS texting to Facebook status messages to Twitter and onward to "nanoblogging". Enjoy.