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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
twitter is giving up essential part of what makes twitter successful.
No Twitter is giving up something you like about it. If Twitter we a community project like Wikipedia it would be successful, but it isn't. Twitter is business and one that is losing money, which is by definition not successful.
Twitters core problem is people tweet links to places not twitter. twitter needs your eyeballs to stay on twitter if they are going to make any money with ads. So they can't have all their users just linking to external content. That is bad business. Look at what facebook does they work very hard to pull as much external content as possible into the feeds whenever people link something outside, why because it chances are if you can produce a story summary and image people will just look at it there. Just like on Slashdot nobody reads the TFA, nobody clicks that crap on facebook they read whats there and scroll on down.
Twitter can't do that in 140 chars. So they need some place for the content to go, that is also twitter.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Because there aren't enough North Koreans to throw the damn missile.
Why worry?
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.)
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."
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.
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.
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.