Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Twitter Will Extend Its 140 Character Limit On September 19th (theverge.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the more-room-for-activities dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Beginning September 19th, [Twitter] will cut down on exactly which types of content count toward the platform's 140-character limit. Media attachments (images, GIFs, videos, polls, etc.) and quoted tweets will no longer reduce the count. The extra room for text will give users more flexibility in composing their messages. Twitter first announced plans to stop counting extras like photos, videos, and user polls toward the limit back in May, but gave no firm date on when the shift would occur. A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment when contacted by The Verge. The date comes from two sources familiar with the company's business, but plans for the rollout could change. Another new adjustment to the character limit is that usernames will no longer count when they're at the beginning of replies, giving users additional room for discussion. It's unclear whether all of these changes will occur simultaneously; certain content types may gradually stop counting against the character limit in stages. But the company will at least kick off the move next Monday.

6 of 135 comments (clear)

  1. It's about time... by geekmux · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ...that a company with an online service stops acting like a cellular texting service.

    Limits are even worse to deal with when they are artificial.

    Then again, so are people.

    1. Re:It's about time... by Richard_at_work · · Score: 3, Insightful

      No. No thank you. We don't need another blogging service - Twitter is unique in its tight limits and those limits do provoke some good discussion while cutting down on the meaningless waffle. I can't count the number of Medium.com posts I have read which could be summed up in a couple of sentences, and thats what Twitter excels at.

      You can still have meaningful discussions, but you do NOT get to post a wall of text and walk away - it takes effort to post a wall of tweets, during which time people may reply to individual tweets, and that is awesome.

    2. Re:It's about time... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It will slowly and surely turn in to a facebook clone.

  2. They'd better tread lightly here. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The genius of the 140 character limit is that you always finish reading a tweet before your brain has time to fully process how utterly boring and trivial the bullshit you just read was. If you give users the ability to pad out their vapid brain farts into essays that take actual time to read, people might finally start grasping what a monumental heap of pointlessness twitter really is.

  3. Growing pains by OpenSourced · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It's curious how many big companies, when they reach a certain age, think that it's a good idea to take whatever make them big, and change it. It's probably the human instinctive rejection of simple inaction.

    Twitter is famous because it forces people to be concise. Tweets are cited in news outlets because they are concise and so provide the short text bite that is easy to digest by the public. Nobody is going to cite a tweet that is longer than the article.

    So basically, what they are doing is giving a step to get closer to a mailing list service. Way to go!

    --
    Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
  4. All messaging services are the same by grumbel5969 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The more time goes on, the more all the messaging services are becoming the same. Even today the differences between Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat and Co. is already rather slim, as they are all essentially used for the same things: post text, images or video to a group of people or the public. Even that fundamental 140 character limit on Twitter is constantly worked around by posting images of text or linking to sites like Twitlonger. The only real difference is the client, some client make it really fast to post video while other focus on images and text, but all of them allow you to do essentially the exact same things under the hood.

    What we are seeing here is essentially see the slow and painful reinvention of email with broadcast functionality. I could even see that turning into an open standard in another few years, as it's rather pointless to have so many apps doing the same thing and be incompatible with each other.