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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.
Now that idiot will have twice as much to say.
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.
280 is clearly too much. Users might be confused.
I say reduce it to 80 characters. If it was good enough for fidonet taglines -
Did I miss anything that people actually post about?
Attempting to star nuclear war with North Korea?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
If this is an attempt to reverse the decline in Mankind's attention span, then it's too late.
TL:DR
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