????Twitter正在努力招徠更多新用戶，同時留住老用戶。為了達到這個目的，這家網站不惜冒險，盡其所能地進行自我破壞。

????破壞是對那些欣賞Twitter無與倫比、不斷更新的大量實時新聞和信息流的用戶而言。然而，這部分用戶也許正在日益減少，而更多人使用Twitter只是為了抱怨、互相爭論。毫無疑問，“Twitter掐架”比起敘利亞的故事或是氣候變化的鏈接更加吸引眼球。不過對于將Twitter看作信息源、而不是一個實質上難以表意的“對話”平臺的用戶來說，這種不諧之音浪費時間，有損用戶體驗。

????但比起如何吸引和留住用戶，Twitter對于想要嚴肅成熟地使用服務的人關心不足，這一點可以理解。不論是作為當事人還是旁觀者，大多數人似乎更喜歡抱怨。

????這就是為什么Twitter推出了“查看”（View）功能，以便用戶的對話更輕松方便。這項功能使得Twitter對喜愛觀看掐架的用戶（面對現實吧，至少有些時候，大部分人都會如此，尤其是牽涉了名人或網絡名人時）而言更加友好。現在，對話已經按照時間順序經過了整理。而在之前，想要繼續談話幾乎不現實，因為你常常搞不清某條信息究竟是回復的其他哪一條。查看對話這個功能解決了這個問題。

????這也讓Twitter更像Facebook了。根據知名技術博客GigaOm.com創始人奧姆?馬利克的說法，這只是社交媒體平臺同質化的最后一步。Twitter添加了照片功能、音樂功能和視頻分享應用Vine之后，查看對話功能是“Twitter嘗試向Facebook轉變的最后一步。”

????同時，這也讓Twitter變得更像留言板了。不過Twitter信息仍然有140字的限制，對于那些堅持將它用于聊天的用戶而言，這一點真令人討厭。無論Twitter的初衷是什么（傳統觀點是，發明Twitter是為了讓人們分享中午吃了什么，而在不久之前，人們也是這么做的），字數限制和這項服務的運作方式仍然讓它成為發布標題和鏈接的完美途徑——它也沒有其他作用了。Facebook的帖子更好地給用戶提供了發表思想和論據（盡管不是都能體現）的機會。即便在Twitter查看對話的功能下，用戶表達觀點也受到了嚴重的限制。這個平臺本身就沒有給對話提供很大的空間，因此Twitter的談話幾乎總是流于膚淺。

????這也許正是許多人喜歡在它上面交流和辯論的緣故。因為非常輕松——這個系統的特質已經賦予了你發表觀點而不解釋它們的借口。你是不是經常看見人們發布信息說：“好吧，這不是我140個字能夠說清的，但是……”？蠢才和智者用140個字表達出的觀點相對而言區別不大。想要解釋自己觀點的聰明人充其量也只能連發好幾條信息，但這也會讓他的陳述變得令人討厭。為什么不一口氣在博客或者Facebook或者Google Plus的帖子里闡明自己的觀點，再在Twitter上發布相關鏈接呢？?

????Twitter is working to attract many more new users and keep the ones it has. To that end, the site is risking doing all it can to wreck Twitter.

????Wreck it, that is, for those of us who appreciate Twitter's unmatched utility as a constantly updated, crowdsourced flow of real-time news and information. The people who use it that way might be part of a shrinking minority, however, with more and more people using the service to yammer and argue. "Twitter fights" no doubt bring many more eyeballs to Twitter than do, say, links to stories about Syria or climate change. But for people who use Twitter as an information resource rather than as a platform for inherently inarticulate "conversation," the cacophony wastes time and ruins the experience.

????But Twitter, understandably, cares less about people who want to use its service in a more serious, grown-up way than it does about attraction and retention of users. And most people seem to prefer the yammering -- both as participants and witnesses.

????That's why Twitter has introduced features to make conversations easier to follow View feature, making the service much friendlier to people who like to watch Twitter fights (which, lets face it, is most of us at least some of the time, especially when the fights involve the famous or the Internet-famous). The conversations are now threaded, in chronological order. Previously, it was near-impossible to follow conversations because you were often unsure which tweet was a direct response to which other tweet. The conversation view solves that problem.

????It also makes Twitter a lot more like Facebook (FB), which according to Om Malik is just the latest step in the homogenization of social-media platforms. Having added photos, Vine videos, and music to its service, Twitter's conversation view is "the final step in Twitter's attempt to become like Facebook."

????And it's a lot more like a comments section. But it still has that 140-character limit, which is the very thing that, for some users anyway, makes Twitter so annoying when the accounts they follow insist on using it for conversations. Whatever the initial intention for Twitter (the cliche is that it was invented for people to announce what they had for lunch, which in the early days wasn't far off), the character limit and the way the service works makes it perfect for posting headlines and links -- and not much else. Facebook posts offer much more potential for (if not always realization of) thoughtfulness and substance. Even in conversations view, users are severely limited in the ideas they can express. It is an inherently shallow platform for conversation, so the conversations are almost invariably shallow themselves.

????That might be the very reason so many people like to talk and debate there. It's so easy to be facile -- the excuse for not explicating your ideas after having stated them is built right into the system. How often do you see people tweet something like "Well, this is more than I can say in 140 characters, but ..."? There is relatively little difference between a dumb person expressing a thought in 140 characters and a smart person doing so. Or, at best, a smarter person who wants to explicate an idea has to spread his or her thinking out across several tweets. The presentation thus becomes obnoxious. Why not express those thoughts coherently and all together on a blog or Facebook or Google Plus post, and link to that from Twitter????