Twitter Testing Notes, a Long-Form Content Feature

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Search Engine Land: Twitter is testing a new feature that would eliminate the constraints of its 280-character tweet limit and allow users to publish long-form tweets. Twitter confirmed the test via a tweet.

When this will become available to all Twitter users? It's unclear. Twitter noted: "We're excited for the moment when everyone can use Notes, but for now, our focus is on building it right. A large part of that is engaging with writers and building community." For now, Twitter plans to test it over the next two months with a small group of writers from Canada, Ghana, the UK and the U.S.

In Twitter Notes, it looks like you will be able to add:
- Formatting: Bold, italic and strikethrough text; insert ordered/unordered lists; add links.
- Media: You can add one GIF, one video, or up to four images.
- Tweets: You can either embed tweets by pasting URLs or from bookmarked tweets.

Notes also has a "Focus mode," that makes the article composer full-screen.

Shi**er

[invictusvoyd]

is gonna get worse I see ..

Ah

[cascadingstylesheet]

So the deliberately crippled multi-user blog (which it turned out, was a rather interesting idea after all) will add ... blogging?

They're already available through this simple hack

[Cy Guy]

Long-form tweets are already available through this simple hack:
1) Type a post in a notepad app up to 1,000 characters
2) Screencap the note & paste it into a tweet as an image
3) copy/paste the actual text as the ALT-text for the image
4) add up to 240 characters in tweet body ...
6) PROFIT!

Re:

[Bite The Pillow]

Or unroll it using threadreaderapp.com to automatically make it a blog.

People can unroll their own.but I never see it.

So they're adding blogging?

[drinkypoo]

I thought statistically everyone had given up on that and was just tweeting now.

Close the circle, I guess.

Sooo...

[aerogems]

SMS on the web, to longer SMS on the web, to blog. Thanks in no small part to Twitter, people these days have the attention span of a fruit fly with ADD, and they think adding a blog function is a good idea!?

Re:

[lsllll]

I always thought the same thing. After all, I thought 140 characters was only well suited to famous quotes like "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." Getting one's thoughts into 140 characters (and then 280) is not an easy task. Properly doing so requires that you write the caveats in your statements, and those take more room. This is why so many people's tweets are misunderstood and easy to jump on. You only have 280 cha

Re:

[aerogems]

Depends on the language. In English and most other western languages, yes. In something like Japanese or Chinese 280 characters can express a much more complete thought.

Monetization

[jacks smirking reven]

This is probably the follow-up to the concept of "super followers" and Twitter is looking to capitalize on giving bloggers and alternative posting option from SubStack and Medium since there are many, many people who will post a few tweets about something but really the meat of it is linked to one of those sites where they can charge a fee to read.

If Twitter can do that in it's own app there might be some appeal to it and some non-advertising revenue streams. I can see a lot of Medium bloggers also postin

I've been needing it for years...

[dada21]

...to put all of my pronouns within the character limit.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

...to put all of my pronouns within the character limit.

Trumpkin, alt-right, blueballs, incel, dickless, victim ....

Re: I've been needing it for years...

[flyingfsck]

âoeAll my pronounsâ - Brilliant!

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Next blogs

[peragrin]

Next up twitter is going to test long form blogs with comments. That way entire articles can be written and published and thus commented on thus removing actual news and replacing all news with tweets.

After all if you cant trust conservative big media not to lie to you who can you trust.

One GIF or up to four images, errr....

[chas.williams]

I may be new around here, but a GIF is an image.

Re:

[brunoblack]

LOL! I thought exactly the same when I read that but then I figured they must mean an animation. Nowadays, people call an animated picture a GIF. I know it sounds kind of ignorant but what can you do?

Re:

[ZiggyZiggyZig]

I know it sounds kind of ignorant but what can you do?

Pitchforks and torches?

Same if they don't pronounce "GIF" properly.

Hopefully a revival of long form writing

[caffeine_monkey]

The golden age of blogging - is that actually a thing? I'm going to call it a thing - really was a different internet. Even if what people wrote was stream-of-consciousness or ranty, you at least got the impression that people sat down and consciously decided to *write* something. Now, with platforms like Twitter, people don't really write. They comment. Twitter is just a toxic stream of comments. Even if Twitter may simply be rebranding and reviving blogging, I'll be happy to see them do it.

Please don't!

[nospam007]

Create a new service called Ramble.

Birdsong here we come

[Catvid-22]

Since it's going to be much longer a tweet, maybe Twitter should just call it Cockadoodledoo.

What incredible innovation!

[george14215]

Worthy of their market cap. This is a special time.

I believe there's a prior trademark on "Notes"

[H.J. Grits]

Surely all the victims/users of the product commonly called "Lotus Notes" haven't died off. IBM bought Lotus to get this, then sold it off to HCL a few years ago. At one point in time, this was more widely used than MS Exchange & Outlook. It was primarily used for email and collaboration tasks, also included DB and application builder functionality. Except it really wasn't very good at enterprise email. And an absolute nightmare for any administrative tasks ....