I have a feature request for micro.blog. Well, maybe not so much a feature request as an idea, or food for thought and discussion. I think it comes from a similar idea that Dave Winer blogged about a few years ago, like many such ideas seem to do.

The idea of a character limit for what’s being presented in a river of news or a social network timeline is a good one and I think two-hundred and eighty is a reasonable one. Naturally that means that longer posts needs to be truncated. The idea is that instead of truncating it with a link to the original, maybe the truncated version can be folded out when clicked/tapped to present the full post in the context of the river/timeline.

I think I’ve seen people mocking up similar ideas for twitter in the past as well.

I can see how it can become unwieldy for very long posts and/or posts with a lot of media attached to it. Maybe a two stage process where posts gets folded out to up to something like 500 characters and if they are still not visible in full they’ll get truncated with a link. Or maybe it’s a setting per client? Or maybe it’s not such a good idea at all. I’m not sure.

Any thoughts, dear reader?