Tweets can have four pictures, each of which can contain several hundred kilobytes of image data. Each tweet carries with it all the info Twitter has about the author, including several renderings of the author's icon. Tweets are huge!#

News: Twitter has the ability to view tweets in tweets...#

Tweets are basically outlines now (the nesting makes them that) but what if we could make them real outlines, and if people really love the 140-char limit (I have doubts that many do) collapse them to 140-character headings. Then only people who were interested in the details would have to see them. That's why I made this post an outline, so you could get an idea of what a tweet could, should look like.#

The 40-column Apple II display. #

Or before that, the 80-character punched cards out of which programs and data sets were formed.#

The 48K limit on Apple II apps. #

Or the 640K that programs used to have to fit in on the IBM PC.#

Limits like these hold back progress.#

After a while, Twitter's lack of a product runner begins to make it a farce. They can chip away at the edges, turning the little rowboat into a huge ocean liner, but it can still only carry a single passenger. Please it's time to retire the 140-character limit. #

I have to hold back my full criticism because now I have products that build on the Twitter API, and have ambitions to have them be influential in moving the platform forward. #

That's why we need critics, who have no conflicts of interest, who can watch these products, the same way a film critic watches the careers of actors and directors. Or a food critic considers the thread that is a restaurateur's career. #

Why did Larry and Sergey miss that Google Reader was the product they should have built on instead of Google Plus? Why did Twitter stick with the 140-character limit, which was (as I think it will turn out) the real factor in limiting its growth? These are all interesting themes, that could and will be explored in journalism and literature.#