Is Twitter a Tumbler Competitor?

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If there’s one thing Twitter’s known for, it’s character limits. It famously only allowed 140 of them and then later expanded to 280. In some ways, that forced brevity made Twitter what it is today: a real-time commentary on what’s going on in the world.

But for years, Twitter has been trying to expand beyond its own character limits, first by launching features like photos, gifs, and videos. It launched a threading tool that allows you to string several tweets together. In 2021, it acquired newsletter platform Revue.

And then just recently, it debuted a new tool called Notes. Though it’s still in the testing phase, Notes will allow users to publish longer blog posts within their Twitter feed. 

But is this something users actually want? Or will it eventually join the very large graveyard of social media features that never caught on? 

To answer this question, I brought on Ernie Smith. Not only is Ernie one of the foremost experts on publishing platforms and newsletters, he also got early access to Twitter Notes and tested them out for himself. He gave me his initial reactions to the tool and we discussed whether it would usher in an era of longform writing to Twitter.