Slashdot Mirror
Twitter Will No Longer Count Usernames Against a Tweet's 140-Character Limit (phonedog.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from PhoneDog: Last year, Twitter updated its service so that photos, videos, and other media wouldn't count against your 140-character limit. Now it's excluding another feature from that limit. Twitter is now rolling out an update that excludes usernames from your tweet's 140-character limit. This means that you can tag as many people in your tweet as you'd like, but still have 140 characters for your actual message. With this change, Twitter is also tweaking how usernames are shown when you're @ replying to people. Now you'll see "Replying to" followed by user names at the top of your tweet, rather than a long string of user names in the tweet itself. Tapping this will show you exactly who you're replying to. This update is now rolling out to Twitter.com as well as the Twitter apps for Android and iOS.
"Write in textese and we'll autoexpand for you into more than 140 characters."
"We'll only count the gzip-compressed message length against the 140 character limit, not the original message."
"We'll only count the CMIX-compressed message length against the 140 character limit, not the original message."
Twitter is realizing that the 140 character limit is a millstone around their neck and is too short; they'd like to go to at least a few hundred bytes, but they are afraid they're going to destroy their brand and be perceived as just another blogging platform, so they come up with all these "it's 140 characters, but..." tweaks.
Dont forget about the fact that when something true as you have said is posted. they mod it to hell to prove your point. pathetic.
What Twitter really needs to do is change from hearts-only, to a visible thumbs-up count (same as the heart) and a visible thumbs-down count.
Why?
Because politicians -- pretty much all of them -- sit there with these asinine tweets that have "hearts" on them in the thousands, sometimes tens of thousands. And there is no indication whatsoever from the people who disagree on the tweet; you have to wade through unending BS to see that, and there's no telling how far you'll have to go.
But if a politician says "X", and it's 10,000 thumbs-up / hearts, and 150,000 thumbs-down, now you know what you're looking at. And for that matter, so does the politician.
I don't care -- at all -- about other folk. But I think Twitter is doing the nation a direct disservice by going hearts-only on politician's accounts. I don't think it would hurt anyone to see both sides of the opinions of their tweets either (goes for slashdot comments, too.) Politicians, though... that hearts thing is straight-up misleading at times.
Anyway. I doubt they care. But I thought I'd speak up here. (Yeah, I sent them a support item on this. It disappeared into the usual darkness over there.)
Wouldn't it be nice if some politician posts X, and you could actually show them what you thought? I think so.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.