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Twitter No Longer Counts Photos, GIFs, Videos Toward 140-Character Limit (adweek.com)

Posted by msmash on from the good-things dept.

Twitter is finally relaxing its 140-character limit. The company announced today that it will now don't count things like emojis, images against the 140-character limit. Adding quotes, polls, videos will also no longer reduce your characters. From a report on Adweek: The moves don't come as a huge surprise. In May, the company revealed that such changes were likely forthcoming. At any rate, with video and GIFs becoming increasingly important to the social channel, the developments make sense. Social media marketers, no doubt, will enjoy the extra freedom as they try to get their points across to potential customers. "With long-form content on the rise, businesses who can take advantage of Twitter's new offering stand poised to create deep, meaningful communities," said Rod Favaron, Spredfast CEO.

12 of 29 comments (clear)

  1. I still won't use it by s.petry · · Score: 1

    I know some people love it, but I am hard pressed to think of anything worth saying in 140 characters or less. I always saw Twitter as like an emergency broadcast system for the Internet, not a form of conversation. Adding an image won't change my view, I have wind in my sails. Just read some of my posts.

    --

    -The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.

    1. Re:I still won't use it by alvinrod · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It's not that there isn't anything worth saying in 140 characters or less, it's that most people don't have anything worth saying in any amount of characters. Twitter prevents bloviated diatribes, keeping the inanity down to digestible bite-sized chunks.

    2. Re:I still won't use it by vux984 · · Score: 1

      It's not that there isn't anything worth saying in 140 characters or less, it's that most people don't have anything worth saying in any amount of characters. Twitter prevents bloviated diatribes, keeping the inanity down to digestible bite-sized chunks.

      Ahem... that was 254 characters, TLDR Mr. Bloviated Diatribe!

      The chunks are bite-sized and digestible, but when the only thing the platform allows is inane sound bites, wisecracks, and talking points that's all the platform has on it.

      (And that one sentence was 173 characters. Nevermind bloviated diatribes one can't even write a single half decent sentence.)

    3. Re:I still won't use it by geekmux · · Score: 1

      I know some people love it, but I am hard pressed to think of anything worth saying in 140 characters or less.

      Sadly, because of bullshit like Twitter, I'm finding more and more humans incapable of offering an attention span to read or create content longer than 140 characters.

    4. Re:I still won't use it by jellomizer · · Score: 1

      I see tweeter more like the stock market ticker form of information than indepth information.
      Most people who read news will just scan the headlines until they find one that is interesting. Then they will read the article. Tweeter is just a bunch of headlines.

      Having space for links will allow people who wants more information a place to go.

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    5. Re:I still won't use it by allo · · Score: 1

      It's a platform for people, who are able to express themselfes in a consise form, without overlong essays.

  2. OMFG my fingers are running to the keys by future+assassin · · Score: 1

    and wanting to type twitter.com and post something like right now, after I post this as Slashdot is more important.

    --
    by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
  3. Bold experiment by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Twitter is not a forum for proper debate. It's not really the short message size which is at fault, but that most of the readers don't have the attention span to read anything longer. So they just tweet their pre-existing views and only follow people who share the same beliefs.

    Twitter was a bold as an experiment for democratic debate, but it's only shown that the vast majority of voters are too pig-headed, too arrogant and too poorly-read to logically debate anything beyond what happened in last nights episode of Walking Dead or FOX's talking points (or worse, Mat Lauer's. Deeeeerp). The problem isn't the platform. It's people, and that applies to any social media platform... including Slashdot. There isn't much serious debate here either. Most people post their thoughts and never even check back. There are no long threads here moving towards 'truth'. And a greater majority post unfunny one-liners (often just a variant of the previous one-liners post) and think they're Louis CK.

    But for posting selfies, spamming, professional self-promotion and reinforcing your own world view, yeah, it's great, and it's true of Facebook, Instagram, everything else.

    1. Re:Bold experiment by _xeno_ · · Score: 1

      Twitter was a bold as an experiment for democratic debate

      I disagree. Twitter was originally intended as a "micro-blogging" platform that ran over SMS with a web interface. The 140 character limit is from that, and it's the reason Twitter usernames are limited to 15 characters. (The remaining five characters in a 160-character tweet are for "command" codes. The SMS interface still exists.)

      It rapidly grew to something that no longer fits that, but it was never an "experiment for democratic debate," it was if anything an experiment in running a social network over SMS. Public forums and public blogging platforms existed well before Twitter did.

      But for posting selfies, spamming, professional self-promotion and reinforcing your own world view, yeah, it's great, and it's true of Facebook, Instagram, everything else.

      While true, it's also useful for one other thing: posting notifications. Most of what I use Twitter for are getting notifications about various things. Twitter has essentially become a "push RSS" service where instead of polling an RSS feed, you get push notifications as updates as posted. It's useful in a very specific set of circumstances.

      It's that last thing that would make me miss Twitter were it to go away. 99.9% of Twitter? Burn it with fire. But using it as a free notification platform with an SMS-fallback? That's incredibly useful.

      --
      You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
  4. A GIF says more than a 140 characters by Plumpaquatsch · · Score: 1

    Imagine a GIF here.

    --
    Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
  5. Re:Pictures fit in 140 characters? by Plumpaquatsch · · Score: 1

    Since when have GIFs and JPGs EVER fit in 140 characters? They'd have to be 3 pixels by 2 pixels. So this makes no sense.

    Well, I guess URLs contain characters . which are no longer counted now? Just a guess.

    --
    Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
  6. Breaking the API again by allo · · Score: 1

    And so they are breaking the api and abbreviate these tweets with "..." and a link to /i/web/TWEET_ID, locking out all existing apps from properly reading them, even their own apps in slightly older versions.