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.
..longer POTUS blasts. I'm thrilled.
Silence is a state of mime.
We should all be thankful for the phenomenal advances in computer technology that have made it possible to accommodate the extra bandwidth and storage that will be needed for this.
"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.
I remember the good old days on Usenet when advertisers and trolls discovered that the posting software allowed them to crosspost their junk to every single newsgroup in existence with no limitations or drawbacks whatsoever. The term "spam" was invented during the ensuing fun.
Now Twitter is going to unleash the same fun with tagging users for trolls and advertisers on their service. Its nice to see someone who still remembers and appreciates those good old days. You will no longer need to follow someone to get their garbage in your timeline. Ah, the memories... I can hardly wait!
so I guess I can use all of "War and Peace" as my user name :)
Do you really want me to spend 2000 characters describing my lunch or that amazing bowel movement I just had?
In 140 characters or 2000, I'd rather you don't describe it.
are in Twitter's near future
My username is a hexdump of the lasted film, to look up my username you just need a copy of that same film and convert it to hex. Once you've done that you can get at this seemingly free data.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
... these changes aren't expected to have any impact on Twitter's overall signal-to-noise ratio.
Log in or piss off.
People already use Twitter for long messages all the time, but due to the character limit they have to do it by posting images of text or other ugly workarounds. If Twitter wants to give priority to short messages, that's fine, but forcing people into workarounds is just stupid. They had the same thing already with photos, people used TwitPic and other workarounds for a long while until Twitter finally started to allow images. It hasn't killed Twitter, quite the opposite, it made it more versatile and useful. I would expect much the same happening with long text support. Not supporting more than 140 characters isn't a feature, it's a leftover from it's SMS beginnings.
Does the quota exception apply only to legitimate handles, or any handles? If the first, what if you start with legitimate handles and a user name expires? Does a message that fit before now not fit?
If the second case, @then @just @by @handlizing @all @words @you @indeed @could @send @yuuuuge @messages.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
Why can't you have tweets that are much longer - say 2000 words, or a whole magazine article?
You can. It's called posting your article on a pastebin, wiki, blog, or other site, and linking it in a Tweet. TwitLonger is a pastebin specifically for Twitter users. Or if it's your own site, the Twitter Cards feature lets you add <meta> elements to control how the link appears.
Don't post images of text. Use TwitLonger.
Because everyone posts their tweets via SMS. Didn't you know that?
Also, Twitter users have *extremely* short attention spans. They cannot be expected to read that much.
"Twitter Will No Longer Count Usernames Against a Tweet's 140-Character Limit"
All this innovation is killing me! What's next, uppercase letters?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...