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International Longest Tweet Contest Seeks Entries

Posted by timothy on from the shannon-sighs dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The 1st International Longest Tweet Contest is open for submissions until April 12. It looks to be a take-off of the famous Obfuscated C Contest. So far the record is 4.2 kilobits encoded per tweet, based on exploiting the fact that Twitter actually passes the full 31 bits of ISO 10646 (the international standard that Unicode is based on), not the roughly 20.08 bits/character of Unicode itself."

2 of 99 comments (clear)

  1. Re:still useless by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Twitter has proven to be a quite useful tool for citizens to report that which the official media refuses (or is forced) to censor.

    Point in case, the ongoing war on drugs in Mexico.

    Entire cities are succumbing to the control of drug lords and their armed gangs, threatening the local media and governments to not report rampaging violent shootouts and gang wars. Twitter has been tremendously useful to warn the rest of the world about what is really going on in those places. Things that the Federal Government doesn't want the rest of the population to see because it puts this painful War and the Army (which has been deployed to openly fight the cartels ON THE STREETS) in a bad light, especially when said Army has been trying to hide its blunders (read: civilians killed in crossfire, mistaken for cartel members).

  2. Re:still useless by tlhIngan · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Huh, that's weird... I still don't have any use for twitter whatsoever.

    I mean, I guess I could update the entire world every time I eat something or run an errand... but to be honest, I can't see why anyone who doesn't already know would care, and if they did I think I'd be a bit creeped out by it.

    Guess I'm just crazy.

    I dunno, this could be useful. Introducing TwitterShare, like RapidShare, but uses Twitter for back end storage! 525 bytes ought to be enough to store a sector of data plus some metadata so you can find the other sectors of data and reconsititute the original file. And then, TwitterDrive, a hard drive in the cloud(tm)!

    It's not like there's much useful stuff posted anyways, so people posting their movies and other stuff would up the usefulness. And get the MPAA/RIAA to shut down twitter. That might be fun to watch.

    Hell, Wikileaks could use it spread files easily - hard to block a big site like twitter.

    Very interesting indeed.