I’m just thinking that missing out on the portraits on the mobile phone isn’t really missing out on content, but that being unable to hear someone’s mobile tweet would be making twitter a two tier content system.

Still, as you say in your follow up piece – it’s up to the wise folks at Twitter what they do.

(And the whole web/SMS getting different service seems awfully close to the network neutrality argument…)

http://tinyurl.com/27zck6

Dave

One thing I haven’t said is that more metadata and payloads don’t become part of Twitter, they’re sure WILL be new systems that do voice and pictures, even video, and who knows what else.

I think there’s a big tradeoff in having two or more systems. I wanted to say how I thought it might work, to get a discussion going. In my opinion I don’t see what would be lost if the web users have features that SMS users don’t because (sorry for the caps, but I think this has been missed) THEY ALREADY DO, and the world didn’t fall apart.

What would happen to the ‘multimedia’ message if I try to view it on my mobile?

“Twitter from Reynolds: *This message not available on this platform*”?

To be honest I still don’t think that Twitter needs these additions as there are tools for this sort of thing already out there. Twitter as a platform doesn’t need to do everything, just do what it does already well.

Tagging is a way of ‘marking’ webposts so that they can more easily be searched by places such as Technorati.

A form of metadata (data about data).

People are linking to content and the tinyurl inclusion is great – but the small overhead of tweets is part of it’s strength.

I have no data to support this, but (in Europe at least) SMS is much more popular than MMS. And SMS is much cheaper.

What you are talking about is something like moblog.co.uk which is great.

I think that the explosion of Twitter is due in part to it’s simplicity, start adding things and it’ll start getting too cumbersome and will start excluding those people who have the simpler phones.

(eg. African countries where mobile phones are often of more use than the internet).

What I don’t want to see is more complexity added to twitter as a tool – if people want to link to multimedia, then that’s cool, that’s up to them. But twitter doesn’t need “complexifying”.

I guess you don’t know about what these people are doing. And that’s how it should be. One thing I think people miss about Twitter is that people have very different experiences of it. One person thinks it’s a chat room (really there are people who do) and people who see it as a publishing tool. And sometimes you’re in an interesting place and a quick picture on the cell phone camera is more interesting than 140 chars. It works. And here’s the good news — you don’t have to use it you can continue to have (your version of) the perfect Twitter experience.