Twitter to launch feature allowing users to post long-form content

Sarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch:

In what could be one of Twitter’s more significant changes since doubling the character count from 140 to 280 characters, the company is preparing to launch a new feature that would support the direct publishing of long-form content on its platform. With Twitter Notes, as the upcoming feature is called, users will be able to create articles using rich formatting and uploaded media, which can then be tweeted and shared with followers upon publishing.

The competition from screenshots of the iPhone Notes app will be tough though.

This is a long overdue feature for Twitter, and to be frank I don’t understand what took them so long (pretty sure I will say the exact same thing for the upcoming “Edit tweet” function, which says a lot about the state of the Twitter product). Facebook and LinkedIn have had this feature for years while Twitter was hiding behind their “brevity” identity to justify not doing anything about the hard to follow/share/read/create Twitter threads, and the oceans of bad screenshots attached to tweets.

Text “attachments” will eventually be easy to read, clickable, accessible, searchable, and consistent within the app or website. Finally. I don’t know if they will replace screenshots of quotes from shared articles, but hopefully the ubiquity of Twitter threads will soon be a thing of the past.

This could end up being a small change in how we use the web itself. If it will certainly be a big competitor for Medium for instance (remember Medium?), I think in the long run some “creators” will even bet on this native long-form Twitter format rather than Substack or Revue for instance: publishing directly where their audience is.

This Twitter Notes feature will of course be a perfect match for the Twitter Super Follows thing they launched last year. This could be very interesting for some publishers willing to experiment too. Get Tweets for free, subscribe for Notes. Like I said when Twitter launched their weather publication Tomorrow:

Pretty sure Twitter is already working on a football publication for the next FIFA World Cup.

It would be pretty smart to launch this feature with a few partners for exclusive and new “publications” rather than rely entirely on the creativity of users. Of course, I am not on Twitter anymore, so I will not be experimenting what people end up doing with it, but this feature makes a lot of sense, much more sense than audio spaces or Fleets anyway.