Write4net lets you tweet past 140 characters

Brevity is one of Twitter’s strong points. Restricting updates to 140 characters of text, including any hypertext links, forces Twitterers to write tightly. It keeps users from boring each other. But sometimes, 140 characters isn’t enough, even for a master of verbal compression. If you don’t already have a blog to which you can link for a longer post, what do you do?

Write4net is a site from Brazilian company Webi4. It’s designed as an auxiliary Twitter service, like bit.ly for URL shortening, Twitpic for photos, or Twitvid.io for videos.

Like Wikipedia, Write4net lets anyone type into a template without first signing up or logging in. To publish, you enter your Twitter username and password. These are passed securely to Twitter. If your login succeeds, Write4net tweets a post title and a write4.net URL from your account. Twitter readers who click the link can see your full-length text post or static image.

The site is new, so it’s not quite bug-free. Page layouts can be sloppy, as shown in the attached screenshot. There are several typos in the awkward explanatory text on the site.

But after a couple of minutes’ fumbling with the controls, I was able to begin posting text and image links on my own Twitter page. The easy URL write4.net/@paulboutin opens an index page of all my posts done on Write4net.

If you’ve already got a Tumblr account, there’s not much reason to switch. But for new Twitter addicts who’ve never maintained an online presence before, Write4net lets tweeters focus on Twitter. Just as bit.ly outsources URLs to keep tweets short, Write4net outsources text. I’m waiting to hear back from Webi4 on whether or not the company plans to make money from the site, and how.

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Tags: Write4net