Ear­lier this evening, @HolyHaddock linked to an entry on Brian Hurt’s blog enti­tled “Why I Quit Twit­ter”. In it, he argues for his leav­ing Twit­ter on the grounds that it is not a good place for debate and extended discussion:

If you want to debate me, I’m open to it. But for the debate to not be point­less, that means it has to be held some­where where ideas can be explored and com­plex argu­ments can be pre­sented. In email, in blog posts, in com­ments, some­where where there is room.

Fig­ure 1. The Problem

Which is fair enough. I would argue that Twit­ter has every right to be bad at con­ver­sa­tion — that’s not what it was cre­ated for. Once upon a time, it asked a sim­ple ques­tion: “What are you doing?”. The user base has shaped Twit­ter over the years, most notably in the for­mal­i­sa­tion of @usernames and #tags which began sim­ply as trends among users. But it has stuck res­olutely to its 140-character limit, with­out which I think the ser­vice would change for the poorer.

I have no real argu­ment with Brian Hurt here — his rea­son for leav­ing is a fine one, and he’s cer­tainly not sug­gest­ing any­one else should nec­es­sar­ily leave for that rea­son. Per­son­ally, I didn’t come to Twit­ter for extended con­ver­sa­tion, and I won’t be leav­ing for the lack of it.

But iron­i­cally @HolyHaddock and I did dis­cuss this prob­lem on Twit­ter, and it was prob­a­bly not long before the con­ver­sa­tion became annoy­ing to those that fol­low us both. (To dou­ble up the irony, I was also using a paste­bin to reply in more than 140 characters.)

I think the real issue here is that although Twit­ter does not well sup­port con­ver­sa­tions, peo­ple tweet things that are likely to start con­ver­sa­tions, and there is no real way to break out of Twit­ter once the con­ver­sa­tion has started. If we assume that Twit­ter has no inten­tion of allow­ing long — even infinite-length — replies, then if there is to be any way to ‘break out’, it must be through another service.

Now the friend­li­ness of the Twit­ter API makes it very easy for other sites to inte­grate with Twit­ter, allow users to sign in with their Twit­ter cre­den­tials, and pull tweets across for dis­play. But as I see it, there are a few issues that would need to be resolved with a poten­tial service:

• Pulling Across. If a con­ver­sa­tion starts across mul­ti­ple tweets, these would need to be pulled across to a ‘break out’ con­ver­sa­tion so that things already said don’t have to be re-said. It’s easy to iden­tify the tweet that started it all, but no way in the API to find all replies to it. Start­ing from the most recent reply, one can find what it is in reply to and fol­low the thread all the way up, but if the con­ver­sa­tion has branched, you wouldn’t cap­ture it all.
• Branch­ing vs Single-Threading. Multiply-branching threads aren’t too much of a prob­lem on Twit­ter, but dis­play­ing them prop­erly may become an issue on the ‘break out’ ser­vice. Reduc­ing every­thing to a sin­gle thread — blog com­ment style — is the alter­na­tive, but this could lead to some very con­fus­ing con­ver­sa­tions, not least if some users’ tweets are pro­tected and thus not vis­i­ble to cer­tain other users.
• Report­ing Back. Should any­thing be passed back to Twit­ter to let other users know where the con­ver­sa­tion is con­tin­u­ing? How would we do that in a way that’s infor­ma­tive but not spammy? Should we instead rely on the user that ‘broke out’ to let the oth­ers know?
• Per­ma­nence. Would there be a slight mis­trust of the ‘break out’ ser­vice, mean­ing that users would pre­fer not to use it in case it dis­ap­pears from the face of the ‘net tomor­row? How would we over­come this, and how would we allow users to cre­ate some per­ma­nent archive (e.g. down­load) of the ‘bro­ken out’ thread in case they have dis­cussed some­thing mean­ing­ful and worth keeping?
• Wave. Some­one must have already done a Google Wave bot that will pull in tweets and let peo­ple do this, surely?
• Pop­u­lar­ity. How would we let peo­ple know that this ser­vice exists, and how pop­u­lar would it be — how many peo­ple want this kind of ser­vice? (Many could be as much of a prob­lem as few.)

Tag­ging onto the Google Wave point, is there a ser­vice like this that already exists, in Wave or oth­er­wise? Any thoughts, oh great inter­web hive-mind?