Chris Sacca is one of Twitter’s largest shareholders. He’s a billionaire that’s gotten really lucky, is really smart, or both. He also owns stock in Medium and Automattic (ugh, in the post he just says “WordPress”).
Anyway, he has opinions on Twitter. He’s basically an outcast owner there, for background. He snuck around to gain the number of shares he did, got majorly enriched by the IPO, but basically has little inside knowledge.
But he’s gotten a lot of attention with a very long (but very good if you’re into Twitter) post about “What Twitter can be” to be less scary or more mainstream. He makes a lot of interesting points, but for the sake of my audience, I want to approach one recommendation he made. He says Twitter needs to better enable users to go beyond 140 character Tweets:
Going Beyond 140 – I definitely think the 140 character limit per Tweet should remain sacred. It’s a beautiful constraint that has inspired a whole new form of writing. However, when users do need to type more than a sentence or two, it pains me to see them take that traffic and attention off the Twitter platform. Twitter should deeply integrate Medium and/or WordPress (disclosure: we are investors in both) into the Tweet compose interface. Need to write something long form? The first 140 characters would be your Tweet and the rest would be directly embedded into your Tweet and hosted in a Twitter-friendly way, already optimized for cards. Landing page monetization could easily follow.
If he was a random person, I wouldn’t mention this. But he’s not. He has influence as a stockholder even if it’s not direct. And I thought this point was interesting. I’ve often thought about WordPress to Twitter integrations but haven’t thought much about Twitter to WordPress.
It’s an interesting concept. If you’ve got an hour to learn what kind of stuff challenges an app at Twitter’s scale, give the whole thing a read.
