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Twitter Will Extend Its 140 Character Limit On September 19th (theverge.com)
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.
As the Dutch proverb goes, "a cat in a tight corner can make odd jumps". Twitter is in a tight place, to which this move may IMHO be a witness.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
...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.
So what's the difference between twitter and any other blog site?
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.
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.
Couldn't they make that available on other days too?
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.
September 19th is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. The extra characters in Twitter should really move the needle on human progress starting immediately.
Other hot Social Media news:
Twitter is planning to change their blue colour from #63aeee to #63aeed - date to be confirmed, but two sources claim it'll be October 12th.
The gigantism trend of phones accelerates.
Maybe that's one silver lining of prevalent obesity; it will make our phones look smaller.
Most people are missing the point. The 140 limit is still there. You will just no longer be penalized for including other content. As a heavy user, currently this was a big bugaboo because you never know how much a picture or link is going to reduce your count. I try to budget about 6, and sometimes it hits that, sometimes it goes clear up into the teens instead for no apparent reason. Its really annoying to have to change your message to make it look like it came from a 1337 D00D just to squeeze 5 characters back out of it, or delete the link.
Not earth-shattering stuff to be sure, but its a big help to users, without touching the foundational idea of 140 characters or less messages.
Forget human conversations... With the 140 limit gone now I'm wondering if it will now be more usable as a public MQTT broker or other communication bus.
Security and performance concerns aside, of course....
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"I didn't have time to write a short letter so I wrote a long one", is an old aphorism. Writing tightly and editing concisely takes skill and wit. Hemingway once wrote the shortest novel on a dare: "For Sale: Baby shoes, Never worn."
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Twitter is desperate to preserve itself as the premier platform for social signaling, manufactured outrage, and trolling; a platform where a character limit ensures that no rational argument or thoughtful analysis is possible. Keep going, Twitter, you're doing great!
How about coming up with a business model?
I've run a few businesses and figuring out how to make some money was usually something we did.
This is just another culture-shattering consequence of piracy!
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
I, for one, look forward to someone bending and twisting a few of these new, flexible twits.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
I can't count the number of Medium.com posts I have read which could be summed up in a couple of sentences
Medium.com should start Small.com and encourage users to create an abstract of each article. Then Small.com would just have the abstracts.
Now they limit your messages based on politics and not on length.
You incorrectly assume that I follow anyone on Twitter. My exposure to it is pretty much exclusively what other people find good enough to link to
Then you are in fact following said "other people", even if said following is through a mechanism other than Twitter's follow button.
With Twitter, I almost always try to have a tweet with correct English spelling, grammar and punctuation, and which takes up exactly 140 characters, using at most 3-4 hash tags. (Yes, I'm on the spectrum.)
What am I going to do now? I hope I don't get Twittagoraphobia with all the space it will shower me with.
John_Chalisque
...to 141 characters! yaay!
leaving Twitter for good
goin' back to Baudot on paper tape
shoulda stayed on the farm
shoulda listened to my old man
back to the howlin' old owl in the woods
huntin' the horny back toad
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Eventually the message body won't count either. C'mon guys, give it up. It's 2016. Can we afford maybe 300 characters, when the payload of a tweet's metadata is already several kilobytes?