International Longest Tweet Contest Seeks Entries

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."

Comments

Oblig Bill G misquote reference

[LostCluster]

140 characters should be enough for anybody!

still useless

[Miseph]

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.

Re:still useless

[Monkeedude1212]

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 /.

Re:still useless

[dotgain]

^ 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.

Re:still useless

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Re:still useless

[tlhIngan]

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.

Re:still useless

[game kid]

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.

Re:still useless

[snowraver1]

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...

Re:still useless

[sootman]

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.

So this is like .. a gzip & mimencode contest?

[Colin Smith]

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

 

Longest Tweet

[Shadyman]

Mine's 140 characters! What do I win?

Re:Longest Tweet

[Nerdfest]

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

Tweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee eeeeeeeeeeeeee eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet!

Amateur.

The original tweeters

[floppyraid]

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

Re:I sometimes wonder

[damn_registrars]

document our times to posterior generations

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