Twitter, or how features through syntax still sucks

I like Twitter, find it practical for many a thing, and use it myself. At the MIDEM 2010 it really was the lifeline of the event. But in between the 'RT', '@username', and '#keyword', there's even less space to express anything really useful. Oh, and let's not forget URL shorteners which add to the crypticness of the resulting message.

So, what I'd like : 512 chars (half a kilobyte, c'mon) for the message, and an metadata part where you'd add keywords and URLs. I suppose usernames can stay in the message since they wouldn't make much sense outside of it, but keywords I doubt it. Ideally, we could mark them as keywords while typing, but the marking would be removed in the final message and the keyword would be added in the metadata. e.g. type "this is a message with a #keyword", results in "this is a message with a keyword" along with a metadata block containing "keyword" as a, well, keyword.

Just for that I think I'll go check what Google Buzz looks like.