Should twitter support multimedia data types

Dave Winer points to a twitter user that does not want more than text in their twitter experience.

The reasoning?

“Twitter is not email. This is the beauty of it. The need to sum up something in 140 characters or less is a strength, not a weakness. If you want to start attaching sound or pictures to it you break the beauty of it, the immediacy and the poetry.”

Similar arguments could be made of IM itself or IRC or any host of other, mainly text-based methods of conversing.

Of course the trick in any of these or other systems is to add functionality without disrupting the current text users. That makes complete sense.

However, let’s face it, twitter’s “poetry” is partial. When I look at a series of twitter posts I often see tinyurls sprinkled about. I ask why? Is this really the best way to do this? What are people doing? And Why? Would posters and readers benefit from a more efficient interface and format?

I’d point out to Kipple above, software, unlike poetry, does not have a final stanza. If it does, it’s value will fade not because it necessarily is in a bad spot or bad form, but because the rest of the world moves on.