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Reminds me of this tidbit from Inc.’s profile of Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh.

Every day, he blasts a steady stream of playful messages to 350,000 people on Twitter. ... Those seemingly off-the-cuff Twitter missives? He spends 10 minutes or so carefully composing each one.

I’ve found 140 characters to be a wonderful constraint. This is exactly how I write my quotes. One silly little sentence has often seen dozens of iterations and possibly been worked on over several days.

I thought this was a kind of joke from Nielsen to start with, but it’s a really interesting post which highlights one of the strengths of Twitter, namely how contained and controllable each message is.

I love the fact NN Group follows nobody.

It is surprising that he can see nothing bad about the last two iterations. I would have preferred something like:

Las Vegas (October) and Berlin (November), venues for our biggest usability conference ever: http://bit.ly/UsabilityWeek

No shouting (someone who can’t see the city names if they aren’t capitalized is probably not interested anyway), and better (IMO) use of punctuation (I’m sure there are plenty of improvements to be made). Also, he really should be up-to-speed about the fragility of url shorterers (and their extreme degradation of usability). With a domain as short as his he would only add three characters (still way inside his 130 character self imposed limit) with a useit.com link instead of a where-does-it-go-really bit.ly link.

This quote, “[o]f course it’s an announcement — otherwise I wouldn’t be posting it… ”, is also indicative of his special way of using twitter. Now, I don’t use twitter myself but I wouldn’t consider most twitter postings to be announcements.

Sorry to be cynical but this sounds like about 6 seconds of thought intellectualised into a full article. Short version: don’t waste words in your tweets.