Slashdot Mirror
Twitter Tests Doubling Character Limit For Tweets To 280 (theverge.com)
Twitter announced today that it has started testing 280-character tweets for select users. The new limit doubles the current 140-character limit, and is said to help users be more expressive. The Verge reports: "Our research shows us that the character limit is a major cause of frustration for people tweeting in English," the company said in a blog post. "When people don't have to cram their thoughts into 140 characters and actually have some to spare, we see more people Tweeting -- which is awesome!"
About 9 percent of all tweets today are exactly 140 characters, Twitter says. It's tough to do that on accident, suggesting that users frequently have to edit their initial thoughts to get them under the limit. (It's certainly true for me.) Now Twitter hopes to ease that burden by doubling the character limit in what it calls "languages impacted by cramming," which includes every language except for Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. The report goes on to note that the "140-character limit was originally established to reflect the length of SMS messages, which was how tweets were distributed prior to the development of mobile apps. SMS messages are limited to 160 characters; Twitter reserved the remaining 20 for the username," reports The Verge.
About 9 percent of all tweets today are exactly 140 characters, Twitter says. It's tough to do that on accident, suggesting that users frequently have to edit their initial thoughts to get them under the limit. (It's certainly true for me.) Now Twitter hopes to ease that burden by doubling the character limit in what it calls "languages impacted by cramming," which includes every language except for Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. The report goes on to note that the "140-character limit was originally established to reflect the length of SMS messages, which was how tweets were distributed prior to the development of mobile apps. SMS messages are limited to 160 characters; Twitter reserved the remaining 20 for the username," reports The Verge.
240 characters is more than anybody needs brag about their kids, pets, vacations, food, and/or political views.
Did I miss anything that people actually post about?
If this is an attempt to reverse the decline in Mankind's attention span, then it's too late.
In the end it is for one reason.
Gab supports 300 characters.
Seems twitter is running scared.
Now that idiot will have twice as much to say.
...they'll have extra characters as in-app purchases!
Millennials have regressed to the level of cavemen, and have abandoned language in favour of pictures. If they want to communicate they'll send a picture via Snap Chat. If they want to express how offended they are they'll post an animated gif which illustrates their self-righteous outrage.
The knock on effect is that software user interfaces have been reduced to pictograms to communicate the functionality. Nasty menus with words that describe the functionality have been all but stripped away, leaving things like the ribbon UI with lots of big pretty pictures to communicate to the millennial. The previous branching Start menu has been replaced by tiles with more big pretty pictures.
Twitter, your additional character allowance is not welcome here. It's non-inclusive, racist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic and will be used by Trump supporting white-supremacists. This extra character allowance has caused me great offence and I must now retreat to my safe space.
Like, wow, man, totally radical!
Take an arbitrary limit, and change it to a different, arbitrary limit. But only for "select" users. Wow.
The point of the limit, and Twitter's only USP, is that messages have to be short. The original limit was based on text-messaging (SMS), of course, but that hasn't been relevant for a long time. They could drop the limit entirely - and just become a rather strange blogging platform.
Twitter has other problems. In particular, their tendency to political censorship has already pissed off everyone who doesn't subscribe to the progressive world view. However, having started down that road, reversing course would piss off the progressives. On top of all of that, their corporate expenses are just nuts - they don't need (and cannot pay) thousands of employees, to run a simple messaging platform.
Changing the tweet length really is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
I bet they just want to save money by not forcing people to say something in ten tweets when it can fit into five. Because they would write them anyway but their systems will now only handle half the messages.
Ezekiel 23:20
Yay, now I can have twice the detail in my death threats and witch hunts.
To the pitch forks!
280 is clearly too much. Users might be confused. Let's just add one character every month.
> "Our research shows us that the character limit is a major cause of frustration for people tweeting in English," the company said in a blog post. "When people
> don't have to cram their thoughts into 140 characters and actually have some to spare, we see more people Tweeting -- which is awesome!"
They need "research" for that?
Stuff that matters....
640 characters ought to be enough for anybody.
Is this a slow news day or something?
If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
@Slashdot The char(140) limit was the big appeal of #twitter to me. It made people express their thought in a short ...
I ain't got time to read long winded tweets.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Oh wait, twice zero is still zero.
It's been a long time since I've used twitter, but last I remember, usernames go against your character count. Want to tell @pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis something important? Well, now you're down to 95 characters. Want to retweet something and tag them? You're probably SOL.
Furthermore, they should stop counting the letters in hashtags and instead just limit how many you can use. There are a lot of really inefficient things that Twitter does that they could clean up...
"Twitter- now with twice the self-serving, narcissistic drivel!"
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
A fundamentally broken design cannot be fixed by changing the size of the problem.
Who says innovation in Silicon Valley is dead? But it was more exciting when they made actual products.
Just like the NY Times does to Trump?
The New York Times Misquoted Trump’s Charlottesville Remarks In Five Different Reports
You did notice, I hope that the article you link is pointing out that the New York Times corrected its errors.
That's how you tell real journalism from fake news: the honest sources correct their mistakes when they make an error.
I'll also note that the corrections were pretty trivial:
“Correction: August 22, 2017 An earlier version of this article misquoted President Trump. He said there were ‘very fine people on both sides’ of the deadly melee in Charlottesville, Va., not ‘the good people on both sides.'”
I'm happy that they corrected this to what he actually said, but whether he used the phrase "good people" or "very fine people" doesn't really make any difference to the sense of the quote.
Twitter shouldn't exist as a company. The technology was an accident, the founders played musical chairs for the CEO position, and a business model to generate revenues came years after blowing through venture capital funding. Read all about it in, "Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal" by Nick Bilton.
Yay!....
I tried to come up with an analogy for how profoundly this change affects me, but even the year-to-year butterfly counts in Botswanna are more significant.
Before: After:
He also wants to go in against a sicilian when death is on the line.
Who else benefits?
280 characters?! When does it stop?! 300? 512? 1k!? Why, you could almost express a coherent thought with that much text.
Twitter as we know it is dead.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
So now his tweets will be Yuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge!
Table-ized A.I.
Why would they still be using twitter?
If you are going to increase it, why put a limit on it?
About 9 percent of all tweets today are exactly 140 characters, Twitter says. It's tough to do that on accident, suggesting that users frequently have to edit their initial thoughts to get them under the limit.
Believe me, most people need to edit more not less.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Do they want to monetize Twitter, using ads? This may be one reason for 280 character limit. Probably they may try to be a seller platform.
I remember an interview with Jack Dorsey talking about how amazing it is imposing a 140 character limit in an age where verbal diarrhoea is a real problem. He said that when people have a limit it causes them to think carefully about what they say and how to get a message across, and that this was one of the defining features of Twitter that separated it from any other blog or platform for people to speak.
He then justified this as why they won't increase the character limit. I think he said that in 2010. ... and then 2012... 2014,.. 2016
Yeah good work mate.
"to do that BY accident". But Americans... those prepositions are so confusing, aren't they...
Flamebait? Because I criticized that cheeto piece of shit? Mod me again, Nazi snowflakes.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Take it down to 50 or 60, would get "hollyweird", politicians & so called news media out of the mix, since they can't think in less than 140 characters.
Must be restricted to a few accounts yet.
Now people can be even bigger nitwits?
"Despite the constant negative press covefefe"
The misspelled word in that Tweet was obviously intended to be "coverage". But phones with a built-in physical keyboard have long since been discontinued in favor of phones with a flat sheet of glass as the only text input mechanism, and many apps don't autocorrect the last typed word in a message.
While simple can be harder than complex, it's usually just simplistic and stupid.
Exactly. The removal of physical keyboards has simplified the phone mechanically but increased a certain category of stupid data entry mistakes.
Longer tweets take.longer to read, given the terrible signal to noise ratio on twitter thats not a good thing. If I ever wanted to read through walls of nonsensical text i would go read slashdot or medium.
I figured that one out in seconds: "Despite the negative press covfefe" means "Despite the negative press coverage". Many messaging applications make the last word of a message exempt from autocorrect.
They could drop the limit entirely - and just become a rather strange blogging platform.
It already is that way. A properly formatted over-long Tweet contains a headline up to 115 characters and a link to the body on a pastebin service such as Twitlonger or on your traditional blog.
The ONLY good thing about Twitter was that it only allows 140 characters. To compose a really good Tweet takes some real thinking skills. That 140 character limit separates the mere twits from the real Tweets.
PlaynBass
see above