M.G. Siegler [500ish Words]: “Simmons has a seemingly odd relationship with Twitter. He gets it, but he also often gets himself in trouble using it. But that’s only because his usage is genuine. And as that platform continues to evolve, he may be able to help shape it. In-line podcasts. Real-time Periscopes. The only problematic thing may be his wheelhouse: writing extremely long columns. Hard to see how you do that on Twitter without some new ultra textshotting tool.”
Textshotting is such an ugly hack. With weblogs, Tumblr, and the emergence of Medium, there is no reason to post unreadable blobs of text to Twitter as images. Just give your piece a nice photo (apparently people like Twitter posts with pictures) and provide a link to the long form piece on your site. It’s “DUH!” simple.
Anyway. Since Bill Simmons gets new media and understands Twitter it does seems a natural fit, however, how does Twitter deal with long form writing? They don’t. I can’t imagine a Tweet storm of 2000 words on a subject, people would drop that like a hot rock. No, Simmons needs a place built for long form writing. I’m thinking Medium, or even Tumblr (hey, Yahoo! has folks dedicated to sports, remember?) Either place could accommodate long form writing and handle publishing to Twitter.
Another weird thought that popped into my head. I loved reading American McCarver. It’s gone silent. Give it to Bill Simmons, if he’d have it?
