For you that don’t know, Pownce was a microblogging service that let you send short status updates, send links, send files (photos, audio files, etc.), and events. I’m a fairly avid Twitter user and enjoy Twitter quite a bit. But the biggest problem I have with Twitter’s current setup is that sharing information (picture, audio, events, etc.) not only have to be done with an external service, but also eat up that precious 140 character content.

Pownce now rings of genius to me. Pownce came out roughly a year after Twitter and added some great features like links and more that don’t take up the space provided by the text area. Pownce should have caught more steam, they just had a hard time in development and others to gain any influence which now makes me sad. But this model solves the one issue I have with Twitter’s current service. Here’s how they could solve it.

Links

Links on Twitter are a big problem. The biggest issue is that you have to use a service like bit.ly (or j.mp) to shorten the urls or else you can’t make a comment on the link at all. The full link needs to be seen. So what should Twitter do? When a link is added to an update, the link doesn’t register against your character count. Then Twitter automatically recognizes it (like it already does) and attaches the link to the post. This way the full link…not the short-url…is posted and shared links are more secure.

Photos/Audio/Files

In Twitter you have to use services like TwitPic, Posterous, or yFrog to post pictures. These photos are also plagued by the fact that a link has to be supplied eating up that 140 character limit. Also there tends to be a bit of loss of context in that each use a comment/reply system that are either disconnected from Twitter (so not may people use it) or is wonky at best. Twitter should supply it’s own photo hosting service (but this might not be a good idea with their 3000 tweet storage limit). But most of the argument would be nullified simply by dealing with the previous link issue. When the link doesn’t take up the 140 character space you can still use these 3rd party services but with greater flexibility. Then Twitter just has to operate like Brizzly does and decode those links so the pictures/audio/files/etc are posted directly into people’s streams.

Honestly, Twitter could keep much more people around and have a much better user experience if they would simply pull links out of the character count. People can still use their favorite photo service, music service, or other 3rd party service without worrying about dealing with an overly complicated interface. But I wish the guys at Twitter would realize that the Project ReTweet, while nice, is only going to complicate things and it’s not what users really want. What they want is 140 characters to make their case. Links should not be a part of that limitation.

Just my opinion. Hope you like.