Twitter’s Brainstorming Notes for Potential

New Features

Should we increase the character limit of tweets to 142 characters?

No.

Increase the character limit of tweets to 145 characters?

No. No one wants this. No Twitter user in the history of our platform has ever encountered the problem of trying to cut down a tweet that was a few characters over the 140-character limit. This simply isn’t an issue.

Increase the character limit of tweets to 150 characters?

How many of these suggestions are going to be changes to the character limit? We are not changing the character limit. 140 characters is an integral part of Twitter’s identity. People are drawn to the simplicity of Twitter and the constraint of 140 characters. We must keep Twitter’s identity simple and clean.

Studies show that Twitter engagement is not going up because Twitter is too boring. What if we added HTML functionality to the tweets so people could make fancy tweets with fancy and distracting formatting?

This is a great idea! Finally, a way to make tweets more exciting. Imagine a flashing pink, bold, all-caps tweet! That will be sure to boost excitement and engagement.

A function that shows the top 10 most liked tweets of the day posted by the people you follow.

No. We already have the new “While you were away…” function which shows some arbitrarily-selected tweets from some random subset of the people someone follows, which is basically the same thing.

Tweets that disappear a few seconds after you see them.

This is a great idea that the teens will probably love but if we do this then how will we get to keep the data?

Ability to edit tweets.

NO. ABSOLUTELY NOT. YOU DO REALIZE THAT ABOUT 95% OF OUR READERSHIP COMES FROM PEOPLE WHO LIKE TO LAUGH AT FAMOUS PEOPLE FOR SPELLING THUINGS INCORRECTLY, RIGHT?

People keep tweeting “.@twitter” at us with their complaints and because they are putting the period before the @-symbol, all of their followers can see them dissing us.

We have absolutely no idea what this means. What does this mean. Is this a Twitter thing. Is this a thing people on Twitter are doing now? Also this isn’t a suggestion for a new feature.

Can we make the scrolling method different? Maybe having the newest tweets show up above the older tweets isn’t the best way to do it. What if we flipped it so the newer tweets show up underneath the older tweets instead?

Yes. This is a perfect example of the type of arbitrary change that users of our platform love and have come to expect from us.

Or better yet, what if the tweets scroll side-to-side? Or even better, what if the newer tweets show up in front of the older tweets and we make everything 3D?! Let’s make Twitter 3D.

Twitter but 3D?! That’s perfect. We love this idea. Investors will love this idea.

Can we hire more women to be part of the core Twitter team?

If we suddenly started hiring all these women out of nowhere, wouldn’t that look a little suspicious? Isn’t that sexist? We don’t want to get in trouble here. One thing’s for sure, we would definitely get a lot of backlash from the men’s rights activist community on Twitter — a very large and active part of our user base. And we certainly don’t want to upset any of our users. Let’s just play it safe and keep our team exactly the way it’s always been. That way everything will be the fine and normal, and most importantly, the same.

Can we hire more minorities to be part of the core Twitter team?

Again, isn’t it racist if we started hiring a bunch of minorities all of a sudden? And what’s with all this talk about diversity, anyway? Our company’s diversity statistics are exactly on par with all the other major players in the tech industry. If diversity was an issue, don’t you think Google, Facebook, Apple, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Instagram, and the rest of Silicon Valley would have more diverse teams as well? But they don’t. Look, diversity in tech is simply not an issue. Let’s focus on more important things, okay?

How about a “Super Like” function where you can show you really, really like a tweet, but you only get one “Super Like” every day?

See, this is a great idea. If only Tinder hadn’t beaten us to it. We don’t want to seem too desperate to copy other apps. Except Instagram. Do we have any ideas that make us more like Instagram?

Ability to rate tweets on a 5-star scale instead of a 1-heart scale.

Actually, this works great for Yelp. Let’s do that. Let’s be the Yelp of opinions from random people on the Internet.

A ride-sharing service that matches drivers to people who need a ride. The service would operate on a contractor-based model so even though the service seems like a taxi service, it is absolutely immune to taxi laws and regulations. Also, later on once the platform finds popularity and success, we can add a new feature that allows strangers to share rides together, and no one will use it.

This is a great idea with no precedent and no foreseeable repercussions. Let’s implement this as soon as possible.

How are we going to deal with plagiarism? Plagiarism is rampant on Twitter. What about a feature that automatically blocks a tweet if it’s detected to be an exact copy of another tweet.

No… Plagiarism is good. It drives user engagement and traffic. If we restricted plagiarized tweets then we would lose 98% of all the tweets on Twitter.

An algorithm that doesn’t show all tweets but only shows you tweets above a certain number of likes or that is customized to predict only what the reader wants to see.

Hmm… we proposed this last year and everyone complained. But it must be a good idea because Facebook is doing it. So let’s just do it anyway.

We need more ads to generate more revenue. Can every other tweet be an ad? Actually can we make every single tweet be covered by an ad that you have to watch for 15 seconds before you can see the tweet?

Yes, this should be the next iteration of Twitter Ads. This worked for YouTube and it will definitely work for us.

When a user blocks someone, it should block that person from showing up anywhere at all in their Twitter experience, even if someone else they follow retweets them and even in searches.

No, because if we did that, the user would never ever be able to see the person they blocked on Twitter at all. That’s definitely not what people want when they block someone.

Pay-for-verification feature.

This was a great idea to generate more revenue, but we tested a pilot version with that horrible Breitbart Editor guy @Nero, or Milo Yiannopoulos or whatever his name is, and look at what a disaster that turned out to be.

Allow users to see the tweets of people nearby.

Sure, this seems like a quirky function for strangers to find each other that in no way could go wrong. Let’s do it.

Can we make it so that the “follow” button that’s on the bottom right corner of every tweet in the mobile app isn’t so easy to accidentally click all the time?

But how else would we be able to expand the connections between our users? After all, isn’t life just a series of accidental connections?

We should change the tweeting structure so the platform offers the ability to post 10 tweets a day for free, then you have to pay to post more.

Interesting. This may be our way to finally make some real money. People love paying for services that were previously free because it legitimizes the service. Brilliant!

We need more fun features. Can we have a feature where any user can press a button and it will get Lin-Manuel Miranda to turn their tweet into a rap lyric?

Honestly, we love this idea and have already reached out to him but he said he’s too busy to do it.

Okay then can we get an even more elaborate animation of the heart exploding into a firework whenever you click ‘like’ on a tweet?

Whoa whoa whoa, hold on now. Our team has been working on this for months and months but this stuff doesn’t just happen overnight you know. Be patient!

When are we going to rework the retweet button so it plays an elaborate and awesome spinning animation to match the exploding heart firework animation?

AGAIN. THESE THINGS TAKE TIME. OUR TEAM HAS BEEN WORKING ON THE PERFECT SPINNING RETWEET ANIMATION FOR YEARS. IT’S COMING.

A better reporting and response system for harassment and abuse.

Listen, this is a great and noble idea but we simply don’t have the time or resources to work on this.

Okay well then you know how we have balloons that show up on someone’s profile page when it’s their birthday? What if we make the balloons an interactive mini-game where you can pop the balloons and score points for absolutely no reason.

Yes. This is a great idea. It’s fun, useful and important. Let’s dedicate all of our remaining funding to make this happen.

Increase the character limit of tweets to 1000 characters.

No. If we are going to dramatically expand the length of tweets, then this number is not hilariously excessive enough.

Increase the character limit of tweets to 2000 characters.

Isn’t Instagram’s character limit for their captions 2200 characters? Can we be better than Instagram?!

Increase the character limit of tweets to 5000 characters.

On the right track, but not better than Instagram ENOUGH.

Increase the character limit of tweets to 10,000 characters.

Yes. YES. Now we are showing Instagram who is the boss. Implement this IMMEDIATELY.

If we are doing longer tweets, we need a new name to differentiate the new, longer tweets from the old, 140-character tweets. We should name them “tweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeets” because that word is longer than the word “tweet.”

Ha-ha! Brilliant and clever! Done! Goodbye tweets, hello tweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeets!

While we’re at it, “Twitter” is a bland company name. Let’s just rename ourselves to “Tumblr 2.0.”

Done.