Woofer – like Twitter but 10x longer

If there’s one thing I like as much as gimmicky gadgets, it’s gimmicky blogging platforms. And I’ve just been playing around with what is now officially The Gimmicky blogging platform of the week: Woofer.

Where Twitter is short – Woofer is long: with a *minimum* yes, minimum of 1400 characters per post. What happens if you write less than that? – it won’t let you post. Ha.

The site is set up like a direct copy of Twitter, and when you post a lengthy paragraph on it, you type in your Twitter name and it crops up with your picture.

Some people get quite ingenious with filling it up; others don’t. One woofer, @LadiesMan217 writes: “I am typing text into a woofer text field. I am typing text into a woofer text field. I am typing…” you get the gist.

Others copy whole chunks of popular and already written books: top woofs include the first 31 verses of the Bible from @yahweh, and the first 2,242 words of Moby Dick from @melville.

I’d just like to quickly tout the theory that the names are a pun with audio speaker equipment, where, I’ll have you know, Tweeters are speakers that emit high pitched sounds and woofers, and yes subwoofers, emit those low booms. You probably knew that. Anyway, I refer you to the relevant authority – Wikipedia of course.

“Woofer is the term commonly used for a loudspeaker driver designed to produce low frequency sounds, typically from around 40 hertz up to about a kilohertz or higher. The name is from the onomatopoeic English word for a dog’s bark, “woof” (in contrast to the name used for speakers designed to reproduce high-frequency sounds, tweeter).”

The philosophy is simple:
“This is simply a novelty website where we thought it would be funny to have a minimum character requirement for public posts and see what people did with it.”

And for those people used to expressing themselves in 140 character chunks, the good folks at Woofer offer some advice on filling those extra 1,260 characters…
– Be eloquent.
– Use adverbs.
– DEA (don’t ever abbreviate).

Go forth and woof… I’m going to post this whole article on Woofer right now.

Related: Why pointless babble is the point of Twitter, and Social networking sites and blogs have love-children