It’s crazy to think that we’re talking about publishing a book on Twitter when the service started by only allowing users to post up to 140 characters.
Earlier today, someone noticed that Twitter had changed the name of its Notes feature to Articles. The feature, which lives under the Creator Studio tools, allowed users to write longer-form content on the platform. Twitter CEO Elon Musk said that Notes is getting a big overhaul — more than just being renamed to Articles.
According to Musk, Articles will eventually allow users to post “very long, complex articles with mixed media,” and users could even “publish a book if you want.”
It’s interesting to see Twitter working to bring long-form written content to the platform, especially since it recently shut down Revue — its competitor to Substack. It seems that Revue might actually have a second life in the form of Articles, and the features that it allowed — like mixing media into posts — are just getting baked more closely into Twitter itself.
I wonder if Musk’s goal here is to create a more closely integrated Substack competitor or go even bigger. While the news is a huge part of Twitter, articles are always read externally. Musk could be looking to provide publications with a way to post news more directly inside the service, much like integrating articles with aggregation services like Apple News and Google News.
There’s currently no release date on the new version of Articles, but it will be interesting to see how it is used once it is live. With Twitter beginning to pay Twitter Blue creators a share of ad revenue, it isn’t hard to see how the company could integrate that with longer-form content like articles.
I don’t think I’d ever publish a book on Twitter, but getting a share of ad revenue or direct payment for articles — like Substack — is an interesting proposition.
