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."

4 of 99 comments (clear)

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

    140 characters should be enough for anybody!

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

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

     

    --
    Deleted
  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).