Compromise for Blog-Length Tweets

Twitter is famously minimalist for tweet length. For over a decade, they rigidly stuck to 128 characters. I found that to be way too short, most tweets required severe editing to fit. Longer tweets used the ugly hack of screenshotting the text. Among the many drawbacks to this approach is that it is usually impossible to read on a phone. I almost never bother.

The expansion to 256 characters significantly eased the pain . But there are still a lot of screenshots out there. Also, I detest reading long tweet chains. I have an idea for a compromise:

• The Twitter client should allow you to create an arbitrarily long post (>>256 characters).
• The Tweet body should consist of the first 128-256 characters.
• The remainder of the tweet content will be automagically turned into a post (sort of like Tumblr).
• The tweet will end with a more link that provides the rest of the post.
• The author can either explicitly specify the break point, otherwise it will be algorithm-based (e.g., nearest complete sentence to 256 characters).

Technically it seems very reasonable. Not sure from a business model point of view. I don't see anything obviously bad about it. In pursuit of ad-based monetization, the Twitter client could do annoying things like throw an ad up when you click to more link. It might have a pretty good payoff--anyone clicking the more link is obviously a motivated reader.