Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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."

22 of 99 comments (clear)

  1. Oblig Bill G misquote reference by LostCluster · · Score: 5, Funny

    140 characters should be enough for anybody!

  2. still useless by Miseph · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
    1. Re:still useless by Monkeedude1212 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Suppose you wanted someone to hear you about how you think Twitter is useless? I suppose you could use twitter to broadcast it. You'd probably get more people to read it than /.

    2. Re:still useless by eln · · Score: 2, Funny

      From what I hear, you can post tweets as the President of the United States now. So, maybe posting about your latest bowel movement bores you, but posing as Barack Obama and announcing you just nuked Nunavut seems pretty exciting to me!

    3. Re:still useless by dotgain · · Score: 5, Informative
      ^ this.

      It's not all about you. I don't tweet much, but I find the service invaluable (though also potentially distracting) as a means of "keeping up with what's going on".

      By the time the 6 O'clock news rolls around each evening, there's nothing on there I haven't already learned. Extreme weather alert? Tweeted. Sure, by looking at the "live feed" I can see that 80% of the tweets are moronic drivel, so I don't follow morons. I follow people I was already interested in before, and through that learn of other people who say things I follow interesting (thanks to people I follow "re-tweeting" them).

      Once upon a time I couldn't see what all the fuss was about and found humour in the name, but when it hit me what you can use it for it was amazing. I now only miss tweets of people I follow when I'm asleep.

    4. 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).

    5. 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.

    6. Re:still useless by decipher_saint · · Score: 2

      Twitter is really just IRC, but instead of just logging channels you can also log users.

      --
      crazy dynamite monkey
    7. Re:still useless by Jazz-Masta · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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

      This morning I woke up at 5:45, had a shower and got ready for the day. I took the dog out, ate breakfast - just a peanut Nature Valley bar - nothing interesting this morning. I went off to work...at lunch I went to Subway and got a 6" Turkey with everything but hot peppers. No salt and pepper today - not for me! Ranch sauce! Now it is nearing 5:00 PM and I'm looking forward to a salad and possibly some chicken for supper. Not sure what I'll do this evening, but I'll post back tonight and let you know. Maybe watch some CSI - is it new this evening?

      Check back tomorrow - will I go to Extreme Pita, Quiznos or Subway for lunch? WHO KNOWS!! That's the fun part!

    8. Re:still useless by PopeRatzo · · Score: 2, Insightful

      By the time the 6 O'clock news rolls around each evening, there's nothing on there I haven't already learned.

      Are you so shallow as to believe that the only people who have anything interesting to share are the people you are "following"? That those few dozen people you "follow" are the conduit by which anything that's important that's happening in the world will come to you?

      It's one thing to use Twitter as a casual communication device among your social circle. To use it as your source of news and information is unbelievably short-sighted.

      Think of what your statement says. "..there's nothing on there I haven't already learned". You are getting less information about the world than the guy sitting in the cave watching shadows on the wall.

      And who still watches the "6 O'Clock News"? 1965 called... Are you saying that before Twitter you got all your news from "The 6-O'Clock News"? You watching Huntley and Brinkley or what?

      --
      You are welcome on my lawn.
    9. Re:still useless by game+kid · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The (US) Americans would catch on to your twisted deed when they think, "What's a Nunavut? --waaait a minute, he's making up names for countries now! This can't be Obama!"

      Sure bet that no one in middle school knows what a Nunavut is, and by Foxworthy's Law there must be a negative number of US adults who do. I'm not sure how these antiadults would manifest, but the ongoing census will probably figure it out. Maybe their annihilative contact with actual adults is the real cause of "suicide bombings". I dunno.

      --
      You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
    10. Re:still useless by snowraver1 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I doubt it, unless you happen to be Brittney Spears, or Kae$ha or some other pop culture icon. Slashdot has many many readers and doesn't restrict you to 140 characters, a feature that also allows you to post an elegant post to describe all about the uselessness of it.

      I hate the word twitter, however it is fitting I suppose. I can't wait until twitter fades away...

      --
      Copyright 2010. All rights reserved. This comment may not be copied in any way including, but not limited to caching.
    11. Re:still useless by sootman · · Score: 3, Informative

      Really? I'd think it's just the opposite. Even a lowly-rated comment here will be read by hundreds, if not thousands, whereas if you're just some loser on Twitter with no followers, anything you post will probably be read by no one at all.

      --
      Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
    12. Re:still useless by dotgain · · Score: 2, Informative

      It could be that, I use both FB and Twitter for very different things. One big difference twitter does not use mutual "Friendships", you do not necessarily follow back people who follow you. On FB I never friend people I don't know (and only have 32 in the list), on twitter it's a different story, and many of my actual friends don't have accounts. Similarly, many people I do not know follow me, but that's fine, I consider twitter my "public" account. You can protect your twitter feed and manually approve followers; in my experience few people do.

  3. So this is like .. a gzip & mimencode contest? by Colin+Smith · · Score: 5, Funny

    Yay. I'll be sure to watch it carefully.

     

    --
    Deleted
  4. Longest Tweet by Shadyman · · Score: 4, Funny

    Mine's 140 characters! What do I win?

    1. Re:Longest Tweet by Nerdfest · · Score: 4, Funny

      That's not what they mean. Check this out:

      Tweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee eeeeeeeeeeeeee eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet!

      Amateur.

  5. The original tweeters by floppyraid · · Score: 3, Interesting

    have been doing it for alot longer than us. Often around here outside it sounds like a DDoS.

    http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1149.txt

    http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2549.html

    ...but did you know it has actually been implemented?

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8248056.stm

  6. Re:I sometimes wonder by damn_registrars · · Score: 4, Funny

    document our times to posterior generations

    I don't know about you, but I would prefer to keep my posterior out of this ...

    --
    Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
  7. Since the decompressor is not part of the tweet... by KPexEA · · Score: 2

    Since the decompressor is not part of the tweet data then then this is very simple:

    To send: Visit a website post your "message", it get's saved on a server somewhere. The URL is then tweeted to the recipient.

    To Receive: Visit the URL and voila there is your message.

    No size limits.

    Kevin

  8. Re:Wouldn't the most efficient form of encryption. by KingKiki217 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Isn't that like entering a pointer as your submission in the 'Most Information in 32 Bits' contest?

  9. Twitter & Unicode by david.given · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Actually, Twitter is not Unicode-safe.

    What happens is you can post a Tweet with astral-plane glyphs and it all appears to work fine, but mysteriously --- a week or so later --- the astral-plane glyphs just vanish. (I don't know if this happens to basic-plane glyphs; I haven't tested it.) I suspect what's happening is that they have different short-term and long-term storage systems, and the long-term systems don't handle Unicode properly.

    For example, see this message. That one lasted for about two weeks before the last word vanished. I should probably go hunting for a bug report form...