Twitter's new Twitter Articles feature could mark the rebirth of personal blogging.
Programmers who don't blog need to start now
Twitter’s 140-character limit was arguably what propelled the platform to global success. Even when that limit doubled to 280 characters in 2017, the formula didn’t change. Then Twitter’s Evan Williams started Medium, which promised to be a kind of Twitter for long-form articles. But it never quite reached the technology of Twitter or Williams’s first publishing success, Blogger. Twitter Articles, however, could do what no one else has since those early days: relaunch personal blogging as a thing.
"This is a game-changer for long-form content. Now Twitter can be used as an interactive platform and has the ability to share content in real-time with readers who also have accounts there," Robert Stern, king of social media, told Lifewire via email. "This opens up a lot of possibilities that were previously limited by blogs/websites where you need subscribers or followers before your post goes live. Now anyone can publish their ideas/innovations/opinions and find like-minded and similarly interested people."
Before Facebook and Twitter took over, if you wanted to share something on the Internet, you had to create a website. Then we went through a few early social networks, but one trend stood out: blogging. It could be a LiveJournal, a Blogger blog, or even a WordPress site, but the idea was the same. You wrote about something, anything, and people responded by writing on their blogs or commenting on yours.
