If you've been following me you'll know that I have bit of a thing for Smart Media Tokens. It's not because of the devs or my faith in STEEM blockchain or anything. I love and support SMTs because of the problems it solve. I'm very quick to complain. I'm an ENTP-Assertive personality type and I evaluvate projects based on how little flaws I find. I have endless complaints about steemit and SMTs can solve many of them (If they deliver). So let's get to the beginning of the complain.
I recently started using https://zappl.com and made several posts. For those who don't know, Zappl is the Twitter of blockchain running on STEEM. Unlike Twatter they allow 240 characters. They also have a messaging feature coming soon. Overall they are a great project and you are better off using Zappl than twitter. (Not that I've ever had an account on that cash bleeding utter failure of a business) My nitpick is that when I clicked to enter an image I had to upload a picture from my Hard Drive. Other than that it was pretty good at what it was trying to be (Killing Twatter).
I'll leave the part about 240 characters being too little for me and jump into something else. Because of the kind of content that is produced I though steemit would refrain from showing the Zappl content on my steemit blog. After making 2 quick nice posts with about dozen upvotes I realized that not just https://steemd.com but also steemit is showing the same content. It was bizzare because i regularly posts thousand or even__ multi-thousand word__ posts and suddenly there are some 240 character posts on the same blog. It just looked odd and inconsistent.
Don't go screaming that all websites read the same bloody blockchain called STEEM. I'm no expert but I do know my stuff. I assumed the websites would recognize the content and decide to exclude certain content (in this case Zappl) from showing up on the feed.I mean someone needs to realize that the 64,000 character cap for STEEM and steemit and the 240 characters plus some links etc means a massive difference. Zappl is more than a 100 fold decrease from steemit. One needs to understand, accept and celebrate these differences.
I can see that people are celebrating (well having a Twatter killer is kind of really awesome) but the types of content must have some kind of separation. Since steemit is the default way to use the STEEM blockchain, steemit could use a customization option to pick which kind of content to be shown and accessed.
I spend a great deal of time browsing the internet. I find many things to share and many clever sentences to speak. When I got into Zappl, I was thinking about posting 5-10 times a day with a bunch of cool stuff. It'll all look great on Zappl but look ridiculous and spammy on steemit (IMO). They way you look great on a beach is different from the way you look great in a wedding. Excluding certain content from something like steemit shouldn't be that hard. steemit could mute all the content with #zappl and show them in a separate tab along with trending, new, hot, promoted and when it comes to the user accounts it could be Blog, Comments, Replies, Zappl, Rewards. The same can be done with https://dmania.lol which is something I've yet to post on.
Introducing ShortSTEEM
I've already proposed the idea for a social media aimed and dedicated for kids in the form of KidSTEEM and recently another idea named AeroSTEEM aimed at the Aviation industry. All these things are possible because SMTs are built to be the ERC-20 tokens specialized for the function of social media. Think what would happen if all the projects on Ethereum were trying to get everything done on and through Ethereum. That'd be a mess. That's what's happening with steemit, Zappl, Dmania etc. Even after facebook bought Instagram and Whatsapp, those platforms were kept separate.Facebook photos don't work like Instagram and FB Messenger isn't like Whatsapp. But they are all owned by the same centralized entity.
SMTs will be built on STEEM but each of them will stand on their own in their own ways. Zappl is the micro-blogging stite and steemit (and https://busy.org) are full fledged blogs. I don't see much value in micro-blogs other than sharing stuff, making some short statements and announcements. I see great potential in an utterly under-served (virtually unserved) market.
MINI-Blogging.
Remember I said that STEEM blockchain (and steemit/busy) support 64,000 characters. If a word has 6.4 letters that means 10,000 words. I looked around Quora and some other places and found that on average English words have slightly over 5 characters on average. So that's easily over 10,000+ word cap. Here is another reserach on the average word count in novels(https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/09/book-length_n_1334636.html) You might find it funny that the average word count of a novel is 64,000 words.
“Animal Farm”
29,966 words (75% of books have more words)
“Ethan Frome”
30,191 words (75% of books have more words)
“The Crying of Lot 49”
46,573 words (64% of books have more words)
“Slaughterhouse-Five”
47,192 words (64% of books have more words)
“We Have Always Lived in the Castle”
53,510 words (58% of books have more words)
“Lord of the Flies”
62,481 words (51% of books have more words)
“Brave New World”
64,531 words (50% of books have more words)
“The Adventures of Tom Sawyer”
70,570 words (45% of books have more words)
“Portnoy’s Complaint”
78,535 words (41% of books have more words)
“Lolita”
112,473 words (21% of books have more words)
“Madame Bovary”
117,963 words (18% of books have more words)
“Mansfield Park”
159, 344 words (9% of books have more words)
“Moby-Dick”
209,117 words (4% of books have more words)
“East of Eden”
226,741 words (3% of books have more words)
“Ulysses”
262,869 words (2% of books have more words)
“Middlemarch”
310,593 words (2% of books have more words)
“War and Peace”
544,406 words (0% of books have more words)
What if we make things interesting by using a cap of 999 words. That'll be a little over 5000 characters and along with formatting we could be using about 6,400 characters. As a person who tend to connect one idea with another and try to cram too much into a single post, I know that hard cap would make me deliver some small amounts of content that can still be highly valuable and profound. I participated in the 300 word stroy challenge by 
300 Word Short Story #+1 A story about a criminal family and a young man who lost everything.
300 Word Short Story #-1 A story about a criminal family and a man who lost everything.
But why 999?
It's around the right sweet spot range and it's an inversion of 666. Blockchain is a place where you can't be Evil. It's a place that can turn the tables against the people who ruin this Earth and society if we use this tech for the good. Also there is the Numerology aspect. I'll use some quotes that is used to describe Number 9 in certain circles:
The 9 is called the "Mother Theresa" number, because when she sees injustice or suffering, she will not hesitate to devote herself to rectifying it. She is so loving and empathetic. She walks like a queen, tall and statuesque, yet feels closely connected with the rest of mankind. At the same time, she is hard to reach, seems aloof and tends to float above the small-minded issues that can be so upsetting to others. You either love her or loathe her, but you can't deny her the respect she demands. She has impeccable taste, is talented and creative, and can be quite eloquent when she expresses herself.
People of Number 9 are very strict in their principles, their judgment often may sound categorically. This people often have a great artistic taste and musical talents. Many of them work in the area of fine arts or in any field of artistic creation. In any case - they are a true connoisseurs of fine art, poetry and music. Their criticism is balanced by a tendency for the good taste. In life people of Number 9 must learn to evaluate any situation with a maximum of impartiality, go their own way and achieve their goals relying only on themselves.
As for a symbol it all looks pretty fitting to me.
I'm not a programmer and I'm not a whale with great power. I'm just a clever kid on the internet spreading ideas based on my own knowledge and experience. I see a problem with the way steemit/busy/Dmania/Zappl utilize the STEEM blockchain. Instead of a simple tinkering I see that we can expand upon this One blockchain; many faces diversity and setup tokens/projects to incentivize specific types of creativity.
When you have to say something with 999 words, you need to have something valuable and content rich. But you'll also have to make it very focused and to the point. Short entertaining/thought provoking pieces can be created and spread significantly fast without being some quick vanity content. I've browsed the net and found short articles that I've really loved and if we can build an Eco-system where the focus is on medium length content, we can add great deal of value to the Earth we are living in.
I'll leave this idea of ShortSTEEM for you guys to think about. Ask yourself how you'd act/interact with a platform that's meant to provide value in sets of 999 words. Sometimes Short films can provide amazing experiences. But something too short like the garbage on Snapchat would only breed vanity for the most part. We need a great sweet spot and ShortSTEEM is my idea of it.
Please resteem to spread this idea.