Woofer is for Wimps

The Twitterverse is abuzz about Woofer, the tongue-in-cheek “macroblogging” service that so closely resembles Twitter as to make IP lawyers walk funny, and which requires a minimum of 1,400 characters (vs. Twitter’s 140 character maximum).

Most of the woofs thus far seem to be either randomly typed characters, or passages from famous books, like Moby Dick or the Bible. This tells me that people just aren’t trying, because 1,400 characters is child’s play for a blogger. For example, the first two paragraphs of this post (including this sentence) accounts for 655 characters, or 46.8% of what’s necessary to woof it. (And, yes, I did have to iterate the character count a couple of times so I could get the actual numbers using Word’s Properties feature. And if you include the rest of this paragraph, you’re up to 60%.)

Now, I realized that actual writing has been rather rare at the Gazette lately, as I’ve tended to substitute one picture for, well, you know…a bunch of words. And I am beginning to worry a bit that Twitter is siphoning off what little creativity I had in the first place to apply to this here blog-like thing. So perhaps it’s good that Woofer has come along, if only as a reminder that, sometimes, 140 characters isn’t enough.

Or, it’s a good reminder that using more than 140 characters for some things is a huge waste of pixels.

With that, I’ve achieved woofability. So, adieu.