Thoughts on Thoughts
The other day, I stumbled upon Thoughts. Might have been through another Bear blog?
At any rate, Thoughts is a very simple blogging site where you have a single page and entries appear with the newest on top. It's meant for short messages, but there's technically no character limit. The site owner describes it as "it's basically like twitter, but nobody can @ you". Twitter for curmudgeons!
Ironically, while Bear reminds me of Diaryland, Thoughts reminds me of Pitas, another defunct blogging site that was owned by the same guy. The functionality is almost identical, and it's super simple to change the layout if you know some basic HTML and CSS stuff.
I've long thought that the real problem with Twitter is that it's being utilized for a purpose that, structurally, it is really, really bad at: Twitter's original point was to be a "microblogging" site, which is to say that the focus was supposed to be on you posting stuff. Things like tagging people, replying to them, etc. were secondary features. But instead, many users try to make that stuff the primary feature, and utilize Twitter as a platform for back-and-forth discussion. Which, of course, is something it doesn't do very well because it was never meant to do that well -- that's what forums were built for.
So what you end up with is people trying to have discussions on a platform that's so badly suited for that purpose that it's nearly incomprehensible to anyone who doesn't spend all their time on that platform. No wonder there's so much drama on Twitter.
Anyway, it's always nice to see more people creating (and using!) older-style websites and systems, especially when they aren't just cranky old luddites like myself. If anything, it's good proof that dissatisfaction with the current state of things isn't just "nostalgia goggles", there really is some functionality that's been lost over the years.