Interesting question +Gideon Rosenblatt.
The 140 character limit does seem anachronistic and unusually limiting, but I think that it's a bigger disadvantage that Twitter has never handled photos particularly well. Many people seem to have moved to +Instagram. If I'm out somewhere and want to share a status, I can do that quickly on Instagram and duplicate it to +Foursquare. If I want to do the same on Twitter, it either gets truncated or I have to spend 5X the time trying to cut words to reach the 140 character limit. What a stupid, annoying exercise that is (sorry Twitter). So I I may post all sorts of things on various sites in a day, but I much of the time Twitter just takes too much time, effort and maintenance to adapt a post to.
So has Twitter "jumped the shark"? Not yet. Regarding their opportunity for handling photos better, they don't necessarily need the stunning display of +500px or the deep metatdata tagging and useful crowd-sourced quality ranking available on Flickr. Just do a search on Instagram and photo contest. A lot of major businesses and organizations are running photo contest on Instagram. That's a lot of corporate marketing departments, people and dollars being invested in the advertising of Instagram, and the development of a user base there. With a relatively small marketing investment businesses can tap into the vast user base of Facebook via advertising on the companies' pages there, so it's a win for Facebook, its corporate users, and for the users, who have a reason to stop by and participate.
Like Facebook, Twitter has a lot of companies and celebrities using it. Could they build out their photo-handling and business-serving capabilities? Absolutely, perhaps through a partner in the short run while building out their own in-house capabilities in the long run.
About deleting the @ symbol… how would we differentiate between words and user names? perhaps we'd somehow designate a user and the screen name would be highlighted. I'd sure welcome the extra space if I didn't have to have the '@'symbol count against the 140 limit. How sad is it that I even have to say that?
You can connect with me on Twitter at @JeffSullPhoto, but keep your messages bizarrely short.
Reshared post from +Gideon Rosenblatt
Will Twitter kill the '@' symbol to simplify the service?
Lots of people have complained about "on-boarding" here on Google+, which is to say, how easy it is to get some easy, early success when you just start using the service. Well, it seems that Twitter is struggling with these same problems, and is now running experiments to simplify the service. Note that, according to one estimate, as many as a billion users have tried the service and then stopped using it.
And despite lots of talk about the service becoming popular with teens, it only grew by a million users last quarter in the U.S.
#twitter
Embedded Link
Twitter Is Trying To Figure Out Whether Killing The ‘@’ Symbol Will Bring Back 1 Billion Disaffected Users
Up to 1 billion people have tried Twitter and then stopped using it.
Google+: Reshared 2 times
Google+: View post on Google+
Comments
I think Twitter has more serious problems. The amount of bullying, harassment, hate speech etc. is just mind boggling and they don't do anything about it.
Yes, sad that you have to say that, +Jeff Sullivan, but true, and truly a waste of people's energy. I've heard people say they like the brevity, and I get that, but surely there are ways of handling both – a meta tag "tweet" field and a longer comment field that you can open up or something. Let the processing power take some of that burden off people's shoulders. With Twitter Cards, the network is clearly moving that way. I'm assuming you've looked at Cards, right Jeff? If not, I think it might help with some of what you're talking about:
https://dev.twitter.com/docs/cards
Note the "Photo Card" option.
Thanks for sharing this.
I've reported crimes and bullying on G+ +Harald Walker and none of the perpetrators were punished, in fact some were rewarded, so my participation went from 4-5 posts per day to one, to less.
If Google doesn't care about its own network, few contributors will stick around to use it. They've been told that for nearly 3 years now. I still hope that common sense will some day prevail so I maintain some level of activity, but even on days when CircleCount shows me as one of the most engaging users on the entire site, my profile, which gained most contacts from mid-2012 into early 2013, shows a net loss of contacts, reflecting a major departure of those users from the site.
Even Facebook takes steps to show that it's listening to its users, acknowledging and fixing problems. So far Google+ seems to demonstrate that Google may be immune to any such rational introspection, and its performance displays the result. I've always been a big fan of Google's stated values, so it's a major disappointment not to see them exercised on G+ thus far.
+Jeff Sullivan All social networks seem to be struggling with support. They all want millions of users but are not able/willing to deal with the consequences. [edited as I didn't see you were referring to G+].
Emailing or talking to someone from Google directly in a support question is nearly impossible.
Good info +Gideon Rosenblatt, but it looks like Cards are for developers, requiring accompanying code. I see that there was talk of Flickr supporting Cards in 2012 and 2013. I tested photo sharing from various sites to Twitter in October 2013 and blogged the results:
How Does Twitter Integrate with Photo Sharing and Social Media Networks?
http://www.jeffsullivanphotography.com/blog/2013/10/01/how-does-twitter-integrate-with-photo-sharing-and-social-media-networks/
While just about every source but Facebook and Instagram resulted in some sort of thumbnail accompanying the Twitter post, my recollection is that only a direct upload to Twitter caused a thumbnail to appear in the left margin, and having a preview of the post's photo there seemed to greatly boost interaction with the post. So as a consequence, I only posted photos to Twitter when I had the time to take some convoluted path for getting my DSLR photos over to my iPhone for direct posting to Twitter, or I happened to have a mobile phone image worthy of showing (which happens not all that often).
I just re-tested a Flickr photo share to Twitter, and it appears that today it does result in a thumbnail preview, so I can now share my highest quality photos from Flickr to Twitter, and that may complement the visibility of my photos and engagement around them. It's a win-win for Flickr and Twitter, and a win for photographers who'd like to have access to a general social network beyond the the many excellent photographers active on Flickr.
Great to hear, +Jeff Sullivan. That's a nice partnership.