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Twitter To Extend 140-Character Limit For Tweets (recode.net)

Posted by Soulskill on from the describing-your-breakfast-in-greater-detail dept.

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."

17 of 174 comments (clear)

  1. So... by taxman_10m · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Is Twitter only threatening suicide or do they really mean it?

    1. Re:So... by AmiMoJo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It makes sense because it's what a lot of tweets already do. Headline and a link to a longer article. All they are doing is providing a space for the longer article on their site, rather than having the user go to a different site to read it. The Twitter app already opens external sites in its own built in browser so that the user doesn't need to switch away from it.

      Why not keep people on the site and grab the be associated revenue?

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  2. done before... by starblazer · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:done before... by Beck_Neard · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You didn't even RTFA.

      They aren't going to increase the word limit. They are simply going to provide an 'extended tweet' functionality where you can add more text as an 'add-on' to your tweet.

      You can already link images and shit in your tweets; and a lot of people just post images containing text. This would keep people from doing that. I can't fathom why morons are complaining about this.

      --
      A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
    2. Re:done before... by DerPflanz · · Score: 4, Funny

      > I can't fathom why morons are complaining about this.

      Strange as it may sound, I have found that the typical Slashdot public is extremely conservative concerning technology. Whenever a (successful) company changes its product or experiments with features, many slashdotters would reply that they are not going to use it, so it has to be crap. Or, they complain how the existing product / version is superior.

      Luckily, the world is not made of slashdotters, and companies and people keep experimenting and trying out new things. And yes, some are indeed crap, but without changing anything, there wouldn't be progress.

      --
      -- The Internet is a too slow way of doing things, you'd never do without it.
  3. Re:10K ought to be enough for anybody by bondsbw · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Minimal compared to what they would have paid to send the messages by SMS (before unlimited plans).

    --
    All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
  4. this is good for press blasts by YesIAmAScript · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:this is good for press blasts by TWX · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Something must be done. Maybe this is the right fix.

      After we fix that we can go on to eliminating vertical videos.

      I don't get why cell phone manufacturers don't have a feature to record a proper horizontal video while holding the phone vertically. These phones have 10 Megapixel cameras in them now. It shouldn't be that difficult to grab the center 1920 by 1080 out of a much larger field for video.

      --
      Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
    2. Re:this is good for press blasts by phantomfive · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I don't get why sites like Youtube still haven't managed to create a proper vertical video player.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    3. Re:this is good for press blasts by mobby_6kl · · Score: 4, Funny

      Because it won't actually solve the problem of terrible vertical videos, which is that they are vertical.

      In fact, it would probably encourage more of them to be created by morons who would feel validated by the new feature.

  5. Re:Changing Requirements by rudy_wayne · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Twitter with large tweets is just an average blog.

    Twitter with 10,000 characters is just Facebook.

  6. Re:More noise on the Internet by ClickOnThis · · Score: 3

    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.
  7. Camera orientation must match that of device by tepples · · Score: 4, Informative

    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:

    Both front- and rear-facing cameras, if present, MUST be oriented so that the long dimension of the camera aligns with the screen’s long dimension. That is, when the device is held in the landscape orientation, cameras MUST capture images in the landscape orientation. This applies regardless of the device’s natural orientation; that is, it applies to landscape-primary devices as well as portrait-primary devices.

    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.

  8. Re:limitations of form concentrates and enhances by DarkOx · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
  9. Re:10K ought to be enough for anybody by arth1 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Minimal compared to what they would have paid to send the messages by SMS (before unlimited plans).

    Before "before unlimited plans", SMS used to be free. The phone companies didn't start charging for SMS until the late 90s.

    First, there was no cost as it was part of the GSM standard, and the packets went in-between other traffic, creating no extra load. With GSM being the only system that had text messaging, there was no talks of charging anything. If anything, it was meant to generate traffic like "please call me when you can", and promote increased talk time.

    But then the phone companies went to extra steps to be able to block SMS, so they could charge fees for not blocking it, backwards as it sounds.
    And as if that wasn't enough, they went one step further, and started counting SMSes and where they terminated, so they could charge extra for both the amount and the source/destination.

    Now they're offering "unlimited" SMS. Which was free in the first place. And most of them don't even offer unlimited SMS, but charge extra for sending or receiving SMS across borders, or requiring an extra monthly fee for that privilege on top of the "unlimited".
    It's a rip-off.

  10. Re:An IDIOTIC decision by Twitter by arth1 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.)
     

  11. Re:An IDIOTIC decision by Twitter by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    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."