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Twitter To Extend 140-Character Limit For Tweets (recode.net)
An anonymous reader writes: According to Re/code, Twitter is doing away with its 140-character limit for tweets. The company is currently planning on increasing the limit to 10,000 characters, though the final number may change before they roll it out. "Twitter is currently testing a version of the product in which tweets appear the same way they do now, displaying just 140 characters, with some kind of call to action that there is more content you can't see. Clicking on the tweets would then expand them to reveal more content. The point of this is to keep the same look and feel for your timeline, although this design is not necessarily final, sources say."
I wonder what ramifications this will have on peoples' data plan usage.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
Is Twitter only threatening suicide or do they really mean it?
Twitters call to fame was quick and concise little blurbs. If someone wanted a full page essay, they would have posted it on livejournal, blogger, or whatever blog/diary/journal site that already exists.
Expand it to 240, Hell, even an even 200... but making it Yet Another Journal Program.... ugh.
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Right now people have taken to including a picture of text in their tweet when announcing big stuff. This is a disaster. It doesn't wrap well for different screen sizes and it makes things hard those assistive devices for poor sight, as they are better at reading text to them than communicating pictures.
Something must be done. Maybe this is the right fix.
After we fix that we can go on to eliminating vertical videos.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Twitter is dying because of its open structure and limited message size. Facebook is eating their lunch. The basic difference? Message size. So, Twitter thinks they can out FB Facebook. I dunno. I don't bother with twitter because of the 140 char limit. Hmmmmm... This might lure me into bothering with it. But can I control who follows me? No. Nemmind.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Twitbook 2016
twitter is giving up essential part of what makes twitter successful.
limitations of form concentrates the minds and enhances the power and effect of content.
that is why (usually, not always, it is true) poetry is greater than prose and a play or movie with time limits will beat up a mutipart tv drama, etc etc.
Twitter with large tweets is just an average blog.
Twitter with 10,000 characters is just Facebook.
I was sending messages up to 10K characters on the (then arpanet) as early as 1984. Beat them to the ability to exceed 140 characters by 32 years!
Seriously, I never got the appeal of this 140 character thing. It seems like that creates pressure in the direction of thought-free trivialities rather than meaningful depth of communication.
Captcha: Capacity.
As a Fidonet user from back in the BBS days I can sympathize...
It's almost like the 140-character limit was a holdout from the TAP paging protocol. I had an alphapager for work and later got one for myself before I could afford a cell phone, it was a very convenient medium if one was mindful of the character limits.
It also reminds me of that Doctor Who episode in the current era of the show where they ended up in the alternate universe and first met the Cybermen- I wonder if the Twitter founders thought that tweets would be used like the daily data-dump that Cybus Industries sent out, where popular twits would send out messages that would cause large numbers of people to pause, look at their phones, chuckle, and then continue on with their day. What we seem to have in reality is a small core of diehard users (both as posters and as recipients) and the vast majority of us only pay attention when the TV media people tell us what some celebrity has tweeted or what's trending. I don't think that most of us give a damn, and now that they're removing the character cap it's likely that they've maxed out their userbase and are struggling to find ways of attracting more users.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I see one advantage that it has- if the medium literally remains text then it's completely portable, doesn't matter if people are getting messages e-mailed, if they're reading them in an old usenet or forums method or even a graffiti-wall method, if they're getting them by MMS message, or even if they're still looking at them through a web browser, plus it might allow for the messages to pass to other kinds of devices as well. One could have a television display twits as a very simple subroutine instead of having a full browser running, for example, or they could show up on a summarized RSS feed on a cell phone's background or screensaver without having to do anything.
But that doesn't seem to be how the userbase is actually using Twitter.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
"Bob Snodgrass reporting from San Francisco.
Twitter officials scheduled a news conference to explain the rationale behind the much higher limit. But unfortunately, people stopped paying attention after 45 seconds, so we don't really know why they increased the limit.... ooh, look! A kitten video! Bob Snodgrass signing out."
Right! What I love about twitter is how concise it really is. You have to think about what you want to say to make it fit and often this causes you to realize you probably don't need to say it in the first place!
I can see this being the death of my twitter usage.
Consider that the limit of 140 characters is a blessing. It inspires us to be pithy, to craft our utterances to achieve maximum effect.
Art thrives when it is constrained by limits of some kind. An example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Can't wait for the pics!
It may be observed
in a general way
that life would be better, distinctly,
if more of the people
with nothing to say
were able to say it
succinctly.
-- Piet Hein
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
email!
I don't see it as "suicide" any more than being able to attach photos to a Tweet was. You'd get the headline in the Tweet and the article in an attached text file.
Twitter doesn't have a real name policy, just a policy not to mislead. Twitter has one-way following, as opposed to mutual friendship. And somehow the FSF feels a lot more comfortable with Twitter than with Facebook.
Because it's not April 1st.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
As if one wasn't already enough.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
And here I was thinking that the hairpiece thinks big!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I don't get why cell phone manufacturers don't have a feature to record a proper horizontal video while holding the phone vertically.
Because the Android CDD requires the camera to have the same orientation as the screen. Section 7.5.5 (Camera Orientation) states:
So in the CDD's terms, what you're asking for is a way to crop 9:16 video down to 4:3 while recording it.
But at least they'll do it concentrated in one place so it's easy to ignore them.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
self-obsessed people prattling on about nothing important, I'm impressed someone could monetize narcissism of the masses
But now they can prattle on at length...stupefying, boring, length.
No longer with their posts about their "AWESOME breakfast" be limited to 140 chars, now they can shit out pages and pages of twaddle detailing their bagel and the egg and the coffee...for 10,000 characters.
In other words, twitter just invented something called a"forum".
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Twitter: the confetti of the internet, now with even more contentless crap!
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
140 characters equals 280 bytes. About the maximum amount of information the hairpiece can process in one tx.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Because there aren't enough North Koreans to throw the damn missile.
Why worry?
"140 characters is more than enough to express a complete thought!"
Indeed. Parkinson's Law: 'rubbish expands to fill the available space'.
140 characters equals 280 bytes.
Windows UTF-16 user spotted!
The 140 character limit in Twitter is based on SMS, which is max 160 7-bit characters or 140 8-bit characters.
(Later, it was extended to also support 70 16-bit characters, which allows for Asian languages or emojis, but as soon as you use a single one, the max SMS length drops.)
When letters
Seven score suffice,
Trim the excess,
Be concise
Burma Shave
"That which does not kill us makes us stranger." -Trevor Goodchild
Or Parkinson's Parkinson's Law: "r-r-r-u-b-b-ish expand-d-s to fill the a-a-a-vailable s-s-s-ap-a-a-c-e."
Thanks. I stand corrected. I was not thinking of Windows and of UTF-16, however. Just before posting the comment, I had been programming in Java; a Java character is the equivalent of two 8-bit bytes.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
This would be much better - count syllables and enforce a 5-7-5 structure on all tweets.
I like Twitter for a reason, and that boils down to its short messages. To me its what every RSS aggregator tried to be.
If its contents becomes anything like the spam i get in Facebook, i'll have to find an alternative that technically minded people like.
Hivemind harvest in progress..
The seismic event, which measured a magnitude of 5.1, occurred 19 kilometers (12 miles) east-northeast of Sungjibaegam, the United States Geological Survey said.
As far as I can tell, that is the appeal.
before twitter and facebook, LJ and other blogging sites had a pretty active community. The format allowed you to post links to "Which timewasting personality quiz are you" and the like but also had a format that encouraged people to actually say something meaningful. And people posted their actual thoughts. But the short message seems to appeal a lot more.
This is the twitter generation. We just don't have anything like that 5-minute attention span that the MTV generation managed.
Twitter's character limit seems to be based on unicode characters. I'd assume it stores internally in one of the UTF encodings.
10000 characters is an arbitrary limit, to prevent people posting entire novels. If some messages take 10K to store and some take 20K or 30K to store it's a fairly minor problem for twitter, where the costs are offset by the fact that this indicates a much larger, more international userbase.
Love the quote, but twitter seems to prove they'll say many times more things if they're limited in what can be said in one outburst!
It's 2015. Er, I mean... 2016.
So say we all
I believe SMS is 160 chars in some countries and 140 in other, or it depends on text encoding.
This must be the most momentous, earth-shattering event since Instagram allowed rectangular photos! My predictions for 2016:
- Snapchat snaps to be viewable for 6 months after opening.
- Vine clip limit extended to 90 minutes.
- Dice completes gradual 'stealth beta' transformation of Slashdot.
- Civilization altering asteroid strike leaves Usenet newsgroups as most important social media.
Overnight there is going to be zillions of articles copy-pasted illegally[*] and that's going to create a mess. I'm concerned that it will make the business of media and news even more worthless. It will also make it even easier for people to self-publish as getting a blog or domain main is a small barrier to entry, which is a good thing. Yet journalist college degrees etc. and credentials will even get more meaningless.
I'm pissed that newspaper physically shrank and are rarely read anymore. Give me back newspapers from the 90s. Even the TV news are rarely watched these days. Although there's no conspiracy behind this, people get increasingly isolated and ill-informed or not informed these days and I suppose that's threatening western democracy itself. Yes you can read in amazing detail about any topic you like but only you will have read it. Other people will read into their echo chambers, including old-fashioned (very unhelpful) bullshit comments about such and such issue being the Jews's fault. (in association with the Rothschilds, the media, Israel, the US, the terrorists or any group you can think of)
[*] It's nominally illegal most times.
It seems like that creates pressure in the direction of thought-free trivialities rather than meaningful depth of communication.
The thought-free trivialities come from the people who don't have much to say that merits more than 140 characters. The solution is not to subscribe to them and their output need not concern you. Everyone else uses twitter to convey single points of information; concisely. If you want to write/read something longer with meaningful depth then twitter isn't the medium for that, any more than a radio traffic update is the place to discuss sustainable transport policy. Go write an email, read a blog or join a forum.
aging systems with multiple text-entry fields. You know, like they'll start a message wherever the cursor goes, then tab to the next field when they run out of space. Or they'll fill the first 140 characters with salutations and declarations of importance. People suck at titles, headings, and summaries. The (questionable) beauty of twitter is to force people to write only short, complete messages, easily read at a glance.
De-twittering twitter makes it email, and a twitter feed with 50 headlines saying "Important: read this" is pretty useless.
That's all it is. commercial entities needed more space to drop in more click bait.
Catchy headline, then low quality information trying to sell something.
So something exploded. That means what exactly?
We have satellites in orbit, did they measure anything? H-Bombs are triggered by nuclear bombs. The least I'd expect is some radiation.
So wake me when you catch some rays.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I have never used twitter. The thing that made me completely uninterested in using it was mainly the 140 character limit. I get the impression that is something from the days of flip phones with tiny screens and having to type with a number keypad.
I figured as well that the 140 char limit would just make intelligent conversation impossible. So there would be zero content worth following.
At 10000 chars, maybe I'll sign up for an account - maybe.
...
Anything worth saying, and things worthless, can be condensed into 140 characters.Tweets shouldn't bring you the evening news.
For me, 140 characters was way too short to say anything interesting. I wanted to be able to tweet about a paragraphs worth of text in order to be able to have any meaningful conversation. I think 10,000 characters is too long, that will break the short message format that differentiates the service.
Congrats, this will soon by my Facebook status
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
No, forums can have threads. This is not organized.
Call me when I can embed a VM* in a tweet.
* virtual machine, not voicemail.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
No, forums can have threads. This is not organized.
Just wait until next year when they come out with their AWESOME NEW feature called Twitter-Threads.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
So how is it different than email - ultimately? Twitter is irrelevant!
Who wants to read essays on twitter?
... they shall rename themselves "tumblr"...