Today, Twitter released their latest update to their service, which introduced their newest feature – Expanded Tweets. What does it mean when a company that has steadfastly held onto one core primary product principle (say that 10 times fast) suddenly accepts a change to that principle?

For years, since Twitter first launched, there has been much discussion about the 140 character limit. Whether right or wrong, regardless of how users actually used Twitter, they held fast to a simple core belief – that the service is best when it enforces this strict limit, which impacts how users behave. This was, in fact, what made them especially distinct in the market. And since then, we all know about their explosive growth in users and anemic growth in revenue.

Fast forward to today. On the one hand, you could look at the news as a tacit acceptance that their business model was flawed and could never work, therefore requiring the removal of the 140 character limit to introduce real revenue opportunities. On the other hand, you could say that this is just a natural evolution of a product offering new features, no different than Facebook adding Events.

The problem with the later argument is that Facebook’s core product principle was that it’s a place for real people to connect with each other, reflecting their offline social structures and making communication even easier. Twitter, on the other hand, had a much simpler principle – let people broadcast 140 character messages to anyone and anyone, without any need to qualify relationships or otherwise. Which leads me to ask, if Twitter had introduced Expanded Tweets as part of the initial product offering, would it have hindered its acceptance?

That old cliche – hindsight is 20/20 – certainly applies, but this feels less like a product maturing and more like something they should have gotten right a long time ago. It certainly is a welcome update, especially for content providers eager for ways to engage with their audience.

It’s always nice when hard work pays off, so a heartfelt congratulations to my fellow teammates, and everyone else at HUGE who’s been a part of the HBO GO team!

Huge is proud to have been named a winner of Communication Arts’s 2012 Interactive Annual Award for the HBO GO mobile application. The awards honor the 35 best interactive projects of the year, and HBO GO was chosen by a panel of leading interactive media professionals as one of nine winners in the Entertainment category.

Visit Huge’s website for more info!

For years now we’ve talked about the promise of the so-called “second screen”, but what has been delivered to-date? Firstly, it’s interesting to think about how the terminology has changed over time. For a while there, all the excitement was about the “third screen,” the theory being that the computer was the second screen and mobile was the third screen. But with the birth of iOS devices and the changing landscape of media delivery, everything is now lumped into just the second screen.

Second screen experiences pose a number of challenges that span from the limits of technology to the limited imagination of content creators. Right now, second screen experiences tend to be f0cused on either wrapping social experiences around what you’re watching, or giving you access to some bonus content. But what else can we do? Can the second screen be utilized to truly revolutionize television as we know it? Can it define the future of storytelling?

The obvious uses of second screens are things like:

1) Sports. Give me access to all the extra data that I can geek out about. Let me manage my fantasy teams.

2) Watch with my friends. It’s a basic truth that media is inherently social, and every media company has experimented with ways to bring the watercooler into the living room.

3) Bonus and behind the scenes content. Self-explanatory.

But is this enough?

Imagine we were to create a TV show from scratch today. A truly “transmedia” TV show where we break all the rules about linear storytelling. A show that takes advantage of multicast capabilities so that everyone watching may have a different experience. What does TV start to look like?

Imagine being able to switch to parallel stories and follow different character POVs. Imagine being able to have your own image superimposed into a show so that _you_ become a character. The possibilities are limitless once creators embrace the idea that the second screen is more than just a place to do marketing.

To celebrate the holiday, we’ve partnered with an awesome charity, goods for good, to help vulnerable children and orphans across the world. It’s exciting to have them as our partner, and it’s a fantastic charity, so visit Reqoop now, download the app, and take some pics. Each pic you take will donate $1 to goods for good!

We’ve been hearing a lot of about TV this past year. Whether it’s “cutting the cord“, or “over-the-top services“, or a zillion other buzz phrases, you can’t read tech press without speculation about the future of connected-TVs. For all the buzz, so far there’s been little advancement.

If you’ve been following such developments as CableLabs OpenCable or Tru2Way, or GoogleTV, or AppleTV, or Boxee, or a zillion other products that I could mention, then you’re probably just as confused as everyone else about where the world is going to go.

The problem? The MSO/MVPDs. The simple reality is that for at least the foreseeable future, the cable companies will continue to control the bulk of the content that you actually care about. And while this is clearly a problem for innovation because of their tight control over the technical ecosystem and limitations of their platforms, we’re at least starting to see the MSOs themselves start to play far more aggressively with tech – case in point such developments as Xfinity’s well-designed iPad app, or U-verse integration with XBOX.

But the unfortunate reality is that there is no content interoperability yet. CableCards and Tru2Way were supposed to solve the problem – opening up the cable system to allow consumer electronic companies to create cool products that had direct access to the cable stream. But, saving for TiVo, very few products ever hit the market. Instead, we’re seeing a rash of so-called “over-the-top” products that interact with the internet but cannot provide the most necessary function to be a killer app – the ability to interact with the content that I actually want to watch!

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